Las Hurdes- A remote corner of Extremadura with a terrible history

Just to say don't let this put you off, we have travelled all around Las Hurdes, the scenery is amazing and knowing its history gives the experience and extra depth.

Crossing Las Hurdes today is like  any other corner of Extremadura, Castilla or Aragón: paved roads for its residents, the “jurdanos” and tourists, new towns, raised behind the ruinous “black architecture” of slate slabs, healthy people with thriving agriculture.

No one wants to remember or to be reminded of a past marked by all kinds of stigmas, real or imaginary: starvation, illiteracy, savagery, poverty, malaria, tuberculosis, alcoholism, hysteria, incest, polygamy, sodomy, typhus, ringworm, smallpox, trachoma, syphilis, goitre and cretinism.

Las Hurdes was a notorious place, becoming mythical with stories about  its inhabitants; deformed bodies like monsters with large heads and bowed legs caused by rickets, edema and osteoarthritis, a closed in-bred population hidden away in the ill-fated valleys behind the mountains. 

Chroniclers and travellers have perpetuated the horrors that they observed over the last 200 years: P. Nieremberg, Fray Tomás González, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, George Borrow, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Miguel de Unamuno, Maurice Legendre, Gregorio Marañón, J. Goyanes, José Mª Gabriel y Galán, Luis Buñuel, Antonio Ferres, Armando López Salinas and, more recently, Luis Carandell, Víctor Chamorro and Maurizio Catani.

In the mid-19th century, the biblical propagandist George Borrow heard of “a small nation or tribe of unknown people who spoke an unknown language, who lived there since the creation of the world, without crossing with other creatures and without knowing that there were other beings besides themselves ”(The Bible in Spain, 1842).

The Jurdanos were thought to be a singular race descended, according to legends, from the ancient Roman garrisons, scarecrows who walked naked or in rags, hiding in the thickets of the Batuecas. Word spread that they were political or religious refugees, such as the Moors expelled from Castilla and Andalusia or Jews escaping from the inquisition. For Gregorio Marañón, the doctor who accompanied the investigation of 1922, these people were “Spanish like the others, of the same race, with the same customs, the same religion and the same language; but more hungry than those of the poorest Castilian villages, almost entirely sick, an immense,mountainous retreat inhabited by people who seemed to have escaped from a hospital”Today Rodríguez Ibarra, president of the Junta de Extremadura, declared with rage: “There are still many visitors who come to Las Hurdes with a 'safarian' spirit, a video camera at the ready to capture the images that Buñuel had immortalized years ago, impossible to reproduce today”  Some environmentalists and archaeologists express their displeasure at the‘ intolerable ’advance of progress. People no longer have goitre; the roads that access Las Hurdes are nine meters wide; running water reaches all the houses; the towns have electric light.

 Two Iconic films made about Las Hurdes in the 20th century. 

The first is a record of the visit made by Alfonso XIII in 1922 accompanied by doctors and clergy. The images could be of medieval peasants living in extreme poverty and destitution. The statistics are awesome, thousands of people dying of starvation and disease, 15 children in every 100 born as what they describe as "cretinos" cruelly afflicted by congenital extreme mental and physical disorders. Goitre was extremely common due to iodine deficiency.


The second film is Tierra sin pan , Land without bread, a documentary made by Buñuel in 1933. Obviously not much has changed since the royal visit of 1922.  It is haunting work with its strange images of goats crashing down a ravine and a donkey being covered in honey by fallen hives and stung to death by thousands of bees, the corpse of a baby being transported over rough terrain and a river to bury it in the nearest graveyard;mentally afflicted boys leering into the camera as they jabber unintelligibly; a seemingly old woman with a goitre, breast feeding a baby, in fact the woman is only in her 30s ; frightening and disturbing images from the master of surrealism.
But look more carefully, Tierra sin pan is a film which breaks down the distinction between fiction and documentary. Many commentators have said that the voice-over narration and the particular subjects Buñuel chose to depict simply parody the documentary genre. However, at this point in the history of cinema the documentary mode was in its infancy. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North: a story of life and love in the arctic (1922) was probably the most well-known film from this genre and there weren’t many others out there. The documentary as a genre didn’t have a fixed set of syntactic conventions that would have been available for film makers like Buñuel and his contemporaries to take as raw material for a parody. Like the grandmaster of contemporary cinema, Abbas Kiarostami, Buñuel does not believe in any fixed boundary between fiction and non-fiction film making.

However, one argument that Buñuel was parodying the documentary mode is the droll and sardonic voice-over juxtaposed with the terrible images on the screen. Actually the original film was completely silent. Bunuel provided the narration live during screenings. Abel Jacquin was hired to read the French voice-over in 1935 which was cut into the film along with sections of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 4.

The voice-over is detached and uninterested, casually remarking on disease and death but it is not a mere parody, Buñuel subverts the documentary, it becomes a propaganda film. Several sequences in the film were staged for effect, the falling goat and the bee stung donkey. Bunuel anticipated many future experiments with the documentary mode that wouldn’t come for another thirty years in the history of cinema, he transgressed the fiction/documentary boundary to indite both the Catholic church and the Spanish for allowing a place like Las Hurdes to exist, a real hell on earth.

This film was banned upon it’s release. Buñuel would go on to produce films for the Spanish Republics film industry: Don Quintin el Amargo, La Hija de Juan Simon, Quien Me Quieri A Mi? and Centinela Alerta. In 1937 he produced a Civil War documentary called Madrid 1936 (or Espana Leal en Armas) but he did not consider these as part of his artistic ouvre.
 

You may also wish to see this, it's an animated film of the making of Tierra sin pan

And finally, a little video about Las Hurdes today

Trip to Coria and the castle of Trevejo in the Sierra de Gata

A beautiful spring day for a trip to the Sierra de Gata in the north west of Extremadura. An area which borders Portugal with some spectacular mountain scenery and intriguing ancient villages.

The oak woods are just coming into bud, mountain streams, spring flowers and vast views. 

Our first stop was Coria which is just to the south of the sierra, a bustling town with a long history due to its situation in fertile valley of the river Alagón.

https://www.turismoextremadura.com/en/explora/Coria-00001 

 Before the Roman conquest of Extremadura it was known as Caura, during Roman times it was an important trading post surrounded by a wall with 20 square towers and four gates, it is a magnificent example of Roman defence architecture from the 2nd though 4th centuries, preserving some original funerary steles.

The Visigoths established the Diocese of Coria, it was conquered by the Moors in the first quarter of the 8th century renamed Medina Caura, it remained on the border between Moorish and Christian lands during the 11th and 12th centuries until reconquest by the Christian king Alfonso VII in 1142. The Alba family were granted the lands which include Coria in 1472 and continued as an important influence until the 19th century, sadly the Alba palacio opposite the cathedral is in a very dilapidated condition, now home to pigeons and cats.

The catedral de Santa Maria de Asuncion was built on the site of the former mosque in a variety of styles during a period of 250 years beginning in the 15th century in Gothic-Renaissance style. The stone carving is a magnificent example of work by Manuel de Lara Churriguera and Diego Copín de Holanda

The stone bridge below the cathedral was built in the Renaissance but it stands over a riverbed that is dry since 1590, when the Alagón river was naturally diverted from its course as a result of a powerful flood.
It is a pleasure to wander around the quiet streets of the walled town coming across other interesting sites such as the Royal prison and the Ecclesiastical prison, the convent of Madre Dios and castle tower which was built by the Dukes of Alba in the 15th century when they were given control of Coria by the Royal family.

There is an attractive restaurant and café with a garden and terrace in the old Bishop's palace which is now a hotel next to the Cathedral

 From Coria it is another 40kms to our destination, the castle of Trevejo. The journey takes us through some lush scenery, stunning countryside with one big blot on the landscape, a town called Moraleja, really incredibly ugly with a 2km stretch of the most unfortunate examples of 60s and 70s cheaply built shops and houses, just ignore it and move on.

 On a winding mountain road one glimpses the castle high up on the right before entering the village of Villamiel, it's just 2 kms further to the tiny hamlet of Trevejo now inhabited by just 24 people.

The village is absolutely charming, seems to have been organically created to blend perfectly into the wonderful scenery, it almost distracts from the looming castle ruins on highest point of the rocky outcrop. We explore the almost deserted village, just seeing a few inhabitants.

The houses are well kept and tiny gardens thrive with flowers and herbs. There were at least three Casa Rurales, I suppose they get busy in the summer when it might be cooler up here. We were happy to have this lovely little world to ourselves. The walk up to the castle is easy, there is a small church on the way with a separate bell tower and some interesting graves cut into the rock.

The castle is so gothically romantic, ancient lichened walls festooned with ivy, crumbling coats of arms, mysterious stone inscriptions, fabulous views and lethal drops, love it.

The castle has the predictable history for Extremadura, it was built on the remains of a Moorish fortress dating back to the 12th century. The fortress changed hands throughout centuries, from Alfonso VII, Christian King of Leon and Castile, to different military orders. Due to its strategic location, it played an important role during the War of Succession against the Portuguese. It was later destroyed in the 19th century during the Peninsular War by the Napoleonic army in retreat. The remains that can be seen today date from the 15th century.


It was quite hot and strenuous clambering around the ruins so we made our way back to Villamiel for a drink and snack before moving on San Martin de Trevejo, another fascinating village in the Sierra de Gata which even has its own language, La Fala, a blend of Castellano, Portuguese and Gallego.


The streets are cobbled with a central gutter where there is a constant flow of water. Charming old houses with overhanging eves, a central plaza with arcades and a fountain, some cafés and restaurants, a super retro bar that looks like it's been there since the 50s complete with aspidistra.

Las Carontoñas de Acehuche on the fiesta of San Sebastian 2020

The fiesta of San Sebastian on January 20 is celebrated in a particularly bizarre fashion in the small village of Acehúche near Caceres. The carantoñas are wild creature characters, mixing paganism with Christianity as they prowl around the village dressed in grotesque costumes made from a patchwork of hides, horns and tusks from sheep, cows, goats and wild boar, the headdress is particularly gruesome with plenty of gore. They revere San Sebastian, an early Christian martyr, in remembrance of the legend that after he was tortured and killed by his fellow Roman soldiers his body was not devoured by the wild beasts of the forest. Arriving eventually at the village church, a procession takes place with the statue of the saint bound to a living orange tree, local twist. There are explosive rifle volleys, confetti and rosemary strewn in the streets. The carantoñas precede the saint performing a ritualistic dance and reverence along the route together with pipes and drums, the girls of the village are dressed in their best finery, some flirting goes on between the hideous beasts and the beauties.

This year it was really freezing cold even though the sun was shining in a blue sky, we did not linger but left with colourful memories and confetti in our clothes.

Here's a video I took in 2014, 6 years ago already, nothing has changed!