SPANISH VILLAGE by Eugene Smith- The complete Life magazine photo report from 1951

These stern men, enforcers of national law, are Franco's Guardia Civil. They patrol the countryside
and are often feared and loathed because of their brutality in following the dicatates of  the government

Deleitosa in Extremadura is an unknown village without any monuments or places of historic interest but in the 1950s it became know as one of the most powerful images of Spain, portraying the misery being imposed during the Franco years on rural communities, especially in Extremadura.

In 1951 Eugene Smith, a member of the Magnum agency, published a photo essay "Spanish Village" in Life magazine. It reflected the instability of the time and the consequences of a terrible civil war in a particularly depressed village.

The report was censored in Spain although it  had a great impact in the U.S.A. and the rest of the world.  There were  allegations against some of his photographs as being over dramatized but what a precious historical record of life in a poor village 64 years ago.

In the 1951 article that accompanied Smith’s pictures, the magazine told its readers:

The village of Deleitosa, a place of about 2,300 peasant people, sits on the high, dry, western Spanish tableland called Estramadura, about halfway between Madrid and the border of Portugal. Its name means “delightful,” which it no longer is, and its origins are obscure, though they may go back a thousand years to Spain’s Moorish period. In any event it is very old and LIFE photographer Eugene Smith, wandering off the main road into the village, found that its ways had advanced little since medieval times.

Many Deleitosans have never seen a railroad because the nearest one is 25 miles away. Mail comes in by burro. The nearest telephone is 12 miles away in another town. Deleitosa’s water system still consists of the sort of aqueducts and open wells from which villagers have drawn water for centuries . . . and the streets smell strongly of the villagers’ donkeys and pigs.
[A] small movie theater, which shows some American films, sits among the sprinkling of little shops near the main square. But the village scene is dominated now as always by the high, brown structure of the 16th century church, the center of society in Catholic Deleitosa. And the lives of the villagers are dominated as always by the bare and brutal problems of subsistence. For Deleitosa, barren of history, unfavored by nature, reduced by wars, lives in poverty—a poverty shared by nearly all and relieved only by the seasonal work of the soil, and the faith that sustains most Deleitosans from the hour of First Communion until the simple funeral that marks one’s end.

Lorenza Curiel, 7, is a sight for her young neighbors as she waits for her mother to lock the door and take her to church for her first communion

At mid-morning the sun beats down on clustered stone houses. In the distance is the belfry of Deleitosa's church.

Lutero Curiel's big sister, Bernadina, 18, kicks open door of the community oven which the village provides for public use. At least once a week she bakes 24 loaves for the family of eight. The flour comes from family grain, ground locally.

The youngest son in the Curieal family, 5 year old Lutero, sweeps up manure from the

 street outside his home. It is carefully hoarded as fertilizer for the eight small fields which

the family owns or rents a few kms outside the village 

Jose Martin makes rounds with lantern to light patients' homes. He does minor surgery,

 sending serious cases to city of Caceres, and treats much typhus.

Out on a walk, the village priest, Don Manuel, 69, passes barred window and curtained door of a home. He has seldom meddled in politics -- the village was bloodily split during the civil war -- but he sticks to ministry, the villagers like that.

At harvest time many of the villagers take unthreshed wheat from their outlying fields to a large public field next to town. Here they stake out 5-by-12 metre plots where they spread the full stalks and thresh grain as their forefathers did

Sometimes luck gives one family stony ground for threshing, another smooth. This brings arguments since the smooth ground makes for easier threshing,  a process begun by driving burros over stalks with  a drag which loosens kernels

Bean planting,  the villager presses hard on his flattened plow as it scrapes the dry soil back into furrows. A neighbor woman leads donkeys, one borrowed.

With the straw already broken away, wheat kernels are swept into a pile and one of the women threshers tosses them up so the breeze can carry off the chaff."

Genaro Curiel, 17, carries his crude wooden plow as he heads for work at a wage of 12 pesetas ($.30) and one meal a day.

The Curiels eat thick bean and potato soup from common pot on dirt floor of their kitchen. The father, mother and four children all share the one bedroom.

While his godfather holds him over a font, the priest Don Manuel dries the head of month-old Buenaventura Jimenez Morena after his baptism at village church

                    

A peasant woman moistens the fibers of locally grown flax as she joins them in

 a long strand which is spun tight by the spindle, then wrapped around it

His wife, daughter, granddaughter and friends have their last earthly visit with a villager.