VALLADOLID, Spain – The north-central Spanish city of Valladolid paid its last respects Saturday with all honors to writer and academic Miguel Delibes, one of its most illustrious sons, who died this week at the age of 89.

Delibes’ ashes were to be deposited in the Vallisoletanos Ilustres mausoleum of this city where the Cervantes Prize winner was born, lived and died Friday after a long illness.

To accept being buried in the mausoleum where writers Jose Zorrilla and Rosa Chacel are also interred, Delibes made one condition: that beside him would also rest his wife, the mother of their seven children, Angeles de Castro, who died in 1974 at the age of 50, leaving him deeply depressed, an experience he recounted in “Señora de Rojo sobre Fondo Gris” (Lady in Red against a Grey Background).

The funeral service for the novelist was celebrated Saturday at the Cathedral of Valladolid attended by family members and representatives of all segments of society, including Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega and Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde.

“Not only does Valladolid have in him its most iconic novelist but so does all Spain and the vast community of all who speak Spanish,” the administrator of the Valladolid diocese, Fr. Felix Lopez Zarzuelo, said during his sermon.

After Communion, the oldest of Delibes’ seven children, Miguel, gave thanks for the outpouring of affection for the family and for his father, “who has lately had more enthusiasm for the next life than for this one,” he said.

The casket holding Delibes’ mortal remains was carried by his grandsons through the streets Saturday morning to the cathedral from Valladolid’s city hall.

The chapel for his vigil had been set up in city hall, through which passed 20,000 people between Friday and Saturday morning to pay their last respects to this master of the Spanish language.

With a literary career spanning more than 60 works, beginning with “La Sombra del Cipres es Alargada” (The Lengthening Shadow of the Cypress) and ending with “El Hereje” (The Heretic, A Novel of the Inquisition), Delibes was honored with the most important awards in Spanish literature, including the Cervantes Prize, considered the Spanish-speaking world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The writer, who for many years was editor of the Valladolid daily El Norte de Castilla and was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1973, was operated for colon cancer in 1989.

Delibes had been among the Spanish authors most adept at writing for the movies and theater, as well as one of the first to warn of the grave consequences of man’s aggression against nature.

Tributes to the deceased author poured in Friday from his peers and from the highest ranks of the Spanish government.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero sent a telegram of condolences to the Delibes family and relatives, in which he said that the writer “has been one of the greats” and “the austere voice of a country sunk in silence” during the years of the Franco dictatorship.

The Spanish royal family on Friday also sent telegrams of condolences to Delibes’ family, in which they expressed their sorrow for the death of the Spanish writer.