Don Francisco Gregorio de Salas was an enlightened ecclesiastic born in Jaraicejo (Cáceres) in 1729, so it is safe to assume that his stupor rellenaria appeared in El País Semanal in 2025. I’m happy to hear the surprise, and I have to decide that it deserves it: there are many things that have been forgotten about his work, but there is a book that keeps it miraculous and fresh. I’m talking about your poems impartial judge, A “critical definition of the character of the naturalists of the provinces of Spain”, from which our portrait was made with a very remarkable man to give time to love and tow. Thus, del Vasco will say that “prefers siempre a su vida / la defense de su fuero”. For his part, the Catalan, “trader and manufacturer, / never lives at home”, while the Valencian has “sustainability for all / of the irrigated”. It is clear that everyone receives their balín. Salas’ tenth most famous song is the one he dedicates to his parents, “each in himself, / and content in his own corner”. Well: I am delighted by the fact that, while they are stuck in their corner, the extremeños are now catching up with the news by leading the electoral trip to Spain that awaits us.
For the sake of transparency, I will say that I have a family in Extremadura, that I have spent a lot of time in my life and that I hope – forgive the grandiloquence – to end it. I am therefore not indifferent to the land to which I said goodbye – “a tear caught my eyes” – to Mariano José de Larra and to the one who blessed the principal Juan Carlos de Borbón. Fortunately, when we want to speak well in Extremadura, we have at hand an apostle like Miguel de Unamuno. The scene reflects Francisco de Cossío. Blasco Ibáñez and Unamuno are at the Hôtel du Louvre and Blasco sings lyrically about the excellences of Paris: “It is without a doubt,” he told Unamuno, “one of the most beautiful places in the world. What is missing here?” Unamuno, in the act, I repudiate that what was missing was Gredos. Quips Apart from this, the Vasco will decide the birth of extreme beauty: the baroque bell towers of “Badajoz which look towards the south”, “the enclosures where pork meat grows and thickens”, “the delicious valleys of Jerte and Tiétar” or “the wooded forests of the Sierra de Guadalupe”. I just missed it horizon from Trujillo, the herds of merinas until the end of the afternoon, or these alcornoques who, stripped of their bodies, took, as Josep Maria Espinàs writes, first “the color of wine and then a penitential abode”. Nothing less, in short, than the idea of a few extreme fields “devoid of trees, burned by the sun and the mountains”. Now the traveler Richard Ford, an extremely demanding man, decides to remember something similar to the amenities of his England: “Absolute quotas for plants and plants. sporty”.
However, from the preamble to its Statute, Extremadura knows that it is affected by “a history which is not very generous”. There was a time when people boasted that “los dioses nacían” were there, but the world is good at boasting about its conquerors. His domain had fewer entrepreneurial elites – typical, in their time, of England – than extractive elites who only appeared there to load the caza or the mountain. Life in Las Hurdes could be heroic, in the style of the French Hispanist Maurice Legendre: the hurdanos had to fight to hold on to their land, like the “Dutch against the sea”. However, Las Hurdes was synonymous with misery. And it seems that there are no names of sweet euphony in Extremadura, that crime often occurs in a place called Puerto Hurraco. Extremadura was also this third province – Alcorcón, Sant Boi – of people who intended to walk.
There are so many things that have gone better than today, if we think of the extremes in the world, we think of the 1,000 stores of La Casa de las Carcasas. However, we have a particular devotion to this romantic Extremadura of the 19th century, with its Espronceda and its Carolina Coronado. Or for this other libresco, sometimes even mysterious, which goes from Arias Montano to Bartolomé José Gallardo and Mario Roso de Luna, “the wise man of Logrosán” to the bibliophile Antonio Rodríguez Moñino. There is ultimately less truth in the myth of Las Hurdes or Puerto Hurraco than in the Guadalupe projected in America, the Yuste which illuminates Europe or this line – the most porous border in the world – which seams us and embraces Portugal. The day a good train left, Extremadura went from “great unknown” to paradise.
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