Jesus Millan Munoz.- There is a profound Spain, it is not like the one from fifty years ago, nor like the one from one hundred years ago, nor like the one from two hundred years ago, but there is a profound Spain…
The sad thing is that everyone forgets it, but don’t think that only those in the big cities do so, but even those in medium-sized cities. I have tried it a few times, and in medium-sized cities, provincial capitals, I have told some acquaintances that have you visited a certain area that is fifty thousand meters away from them, have you ever traveled on a certain second- or third-class paved road, have you visited, even if it is just the town square in a certain place, especially places where the asphalt ends and from there or there, there are only roads and endless mountains or plains. And almost everyone tells me that they have not.
These people may have travelled to North America, to various places in Europe, some to other continents, but they have not visited a landscape or place that is perhaps a hundred kilometres or less from their usual home. There are almost forgotten corners, where you step on their soil and feel that perhaps the last people to have been there were a Neolithic family that passed through that place. Certainly, it is not true. But it is an image and metaphor that is important.
We must change our mentality, to appreciate each provincial, regional or district land, we must know it fairly well… We are different, but we are all different, five people live and inhabit a house, and each one is different from the other. Each district and its inhabitants and its stones and its greenery are different from the others, each province, each region, each nation-state. But the differences are always less than the similarities…
I have written a few times, you have two weeks of vacation a year, or on mixed or combined days. So go for a week wherever you want, inside or outside the Peninsula, or go to your second residence, but leave a few days a year to visit places and spots that may be very close to you, perhaps fifty thousand meters, perhaps one hundred thousand meters, that perhaps you have never been, perhaps within your province, perhaps a little further away. And, yes, the natives treat the foreign tenants well, treat them well, in prices, so that a beer/chocolate/soft drink costs you the same as the countryman who was born there, and who has not even gone to the military, to another city, as to that person, from outside Spain or from within, who has fallen there. Let us be ethical and moral, because true tourism is that which spreads by word of mouth and ear…
There is a profound Spain because we have made Spain a profound Spain. Everyone and among everyone. Those who live in their areas and districts, because you feel ashamed when they compare what is theirs with what exists in the big capitals. Because obviously, a town of a thousand or a hundred inhabitants cannot be compared in many variables and vectors with one of a million or three million. But we all have something that is different from everyone else’s. We have all fallen into a place. We all have to appreciate what everyone else has. Because it is the way and manner of being and of being in the world. Sometimes, we forget something that we are always hearing in the written words, those philosophical movements of Heideggerand its descendants. Existence is all existence, and not only that of the theatres of Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Bilbao, La Coruña…
A literary opinion piece is just that, it is something in which someone offers an opinion with their name, it is not an academic text, nor a university text, nor even an essay, but a mixture of popular ideas, traditional ideas, taking a fact from yesterday or centuries that remains today, something from other knowledge, and the idiosyncrasy of the textuador or writer – the neologism of text, textuador, the one who makes texts, is good. That is why, when I touch on this subject, now called uninhabited, emptied, depopulated Spain, etc. Something that comes from generations, not just from now, in each one of those eight hundred little ant-words, I always say a half-nonsense or a half-truth. Here, I suggest that each area or region or town, that has something typical, I say, that they send a box as a gift to each one of the regional, national senators or congressmen, and, to the Maximum Authorities, of the State and the Government. To promote them.
And, the High Authorities, following a cyclical order, buy for their official pantries, typical products from each and every one of the areas of the regions they administer. I think it would be a way and a manner of promoting our products. On official holidays, putting a meal or a dessert or something typical from each area of our homeland and changing it for others… Well, it won’t be a great idea that will change the world, but perhaps, it would be that little accent or that little comma, that makes a sentence be one way or another…
Spain did so much, Spain did so much that it dissolved into crystallization and materialization. Nowhere can this reality be perceived, of this enormous effort after an enormous and great race, nowhere can it be perceived as much as in this deep and profound Spain… Peace and goodness and truth and veracity and goodness and bread… Because in the end we are talking about bread, even though we have not mentioned it until now…
