No one expects it, there is no real way to tell when or how it will happen, we place it under a question mark on the budget, we talk about it in general terms, everyone knows about "the unexpected."
It is early morning and the crew at the Brisas del Este has started to dig the new foundation holes, where concrete and rebar will be eventually placed, and from where the improved Brisas shall rise and become one with the outer walls, together lasting perhaps another couple of hundred years, or more.
This week the crew has started digging as planned from the most eastern point of the lot, and today, as they dig a shovel meets the ground and instead of bringing out dirt it gives into a much larger excavation, just like in the Indiana Jones movies when Indi falls right through a seemingly innocent hole only to go two levels deeper and find himself covered with nasty snakes.
No snakes in our case but instead we find a large, well built, never used, concrete-block walled and professionally reinforced underground space that has obviously been designed and created as the sewer deposit not that long ago, and which exceeds our requirements in size and type for the end receptacle of the treatment plant that the Municipality requires for a business such as the hotel.
Can you say "let's save some money?" -- A great find!
It is hole week.
Later that day, as the crew moves along digging the foundation areas as laid out by the Architect and the Site's Manager, they make another finding, another very large underground hole, a water storage which everyone guesses dates around to the origins of La Pedrera, over a 100 to 150 years ago? Likely prior to the houses that conformed the hotel in its origins, it might have been a water reservoir when there was no town but instead an expansive land holding. The walls, the structure, the quality of the workmanship are telling of a past long gone, no rebar, perfect bricks, concave in its shape. Several men fit inside if it, aided by a ladder they lower themselves in and begin the laborious process of taking the water and other sediment out eating a day or more into the schedule.
A friend who is visiting comments that it could make a great cellar, yes, perhaps, only if it was not located in the very center of the foundation scheme! In the days to come the underground space shall be drained, secured and eventually, once the foundation structure is in place filled out and left for the next crew (we speculate a couple of hundred years from now) to find out.
Someone, another friend asked me if I had 'thrown' a message in this old hole... should I? And if I did, what would it say?
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