On Wednesdays at sunset, a historical cluedo is celebrated in its streets in Granadilla (Cáceres). Each student is characterized by a character from the town; the teacher, the judge, the priest or the baker, among others. The goal, to discover why Aunt Asuncion died. But in the outcome of this game there are no accidental deaths, illnesses or murderers. The fictitious neighbor with the name of the town's patron saint dies of grief. Of sadness for leaving the place where he was born.
“When I see all those older people, some in wheelchairs, who go to see the house where they lived and to which they could not return, I am very sorry. Imagine the drama of having to suddenly drop everything. Say goodbye to your neighbors, sell what you have and leave. It is very hard to be kicked out of the place where you were born. " Sergio Pérez Martín, coordinator of the Program for the Recovery and Educational Use of Abandoned Villages, wants this fateful event in the history of the people of Cáceres to be internalized by the young people who visit the town every week.
Today, Granadilla is a museum town. Owned by the Tagus Hydrographic Confederation and subject to the guidelines of the autonomous organization Red de Parques Nacionales, the latter gave up its space to the Ministry of Education in 1984 to host the state program coordinated by Sergio Pérez that brings rural life closer to new generations. For a few days, a total of 75 students from all over Spain exchange mobiles and video games for local crafts, cleaning, restoring the ruins and the sweet artisans they make in their bakery. These students, together with a team of maintenance, administration and state personnel, are the only ones who sporadically inhabit their lands.
Beyond the student life, Granadilla is a ghost place. There is no water or services, and the light comes from solar panels and generators. With limited opening hours to the public, from Tuesday to Sunday, it lacks a tourist office and any type of accommodation, bar or restaurant. The tourist visits take place on their own, largely attracted by the unprecedented location: Granadilla is one of the few fortress municipalities in Spain - together with Ávila, Morella and Lugo - that still maintains its original wall. Others seek to tour the stage of one of the saddest stories in our geography. The one of a town that was forced to become extinct after the decree in 1955 of its forced expropriation. The reason, being buried by the waters of the newly built Gabriel y Galán reservoir that would contain the Aragón river.
Please, don't say it's an abandoned town, because they kicked us out. I did not leave my town to seek a better future. " Eugenio Jiménez (1947) is one of the members of the 90 families who were forced to leave their homes and farmland in just a decade and start from scratch. Many moved to the settlement town now known as Alagón del Río. The rest settled in the rest of the country. “People left without money, without a house and with an uncertain future. They compensated you at their own discretion and according to the type of land you owned, so imagine, "recalls Eugenio.
For more than two decades, Eugenio has presided over the Association of Sons of Granadilla in his fight to return to the town where he was born. “Now I live in Jaraíz de la Vera, but a plaque with the name of Villa Granadilla hangs on my door. My people are piggybacking with me, "he proclaims, and says that his only final wish is to be able to rest in it:" Since you do not choose the place where you are born, at least you can choose where you rest. " Until today, the town continues to be classified as "abandoned", although at no time was it flooded; not even with the reservoir full.
The years passed, but the residents of Granadilla never gave up on returning to their town. Appearances in the media and many visits to political and administrative figures. All without success. "We wanted to bring him back to life. If not inhabiting it, at least promoting the tourist attraction of its old town and surroundings, and creating new homes on the outskirts ”. The reason for this repeated refusal, as Jiménez points out, is none other than the lack of humanity in politics. "No one wanted to take over an uninhabited town like Granadilla precisely because of that, because they did not give votes. What we demand is fair, and they don't even give us a town house where we meet every year. During his time as president of the Junta de Extremadura, Rodríguez Ibarra never received me, and I think there was nothing more logical than our cause in that historical memory that he defended so much. ”
According to a 1986 article by Alcántara, Magazine of the Cacereño Studies Seminar , signed by the professor of Urban and Regional Analysis of the University of Extremadura Antonio José Campesino Fernández, the residents of Granadilla experienced an "absolutely Kafkaesque situation " . After their land was expropriated and unpaid, they found it necessary to satisfy rents to the Tajo Hydrographic Confederation in order to continue cultivating on their own land until the final march.
“Eliminate at a stroke 11 centuries of urban history and shared space lived by the inhabitants of a village and their land, arguing that the Gabriel y Galán reservoir was an infrastructure of public utility for the development of the neighboring region del Valle del Alagón, is still a political fallacy of the Franco dictatorship , " continues the article . " Dress a saint by undressing another, who was not to blame. Men and resources (…) disappeared as cultural heritage due to a profitable political decision for another region, alien to their lives, which ruined the existence of an entire town, depriving future generations of sharp lessons in geographic wisdom and a historical legacy. ” The human uprooting of the population, continues Campesino, was immense.
“The separation was as traumatic as the nail of the meat. There they left their existence and even their deceased in the cemetery flooded by the reservoir, except for those who decided to take their remains with them. It was said that some died of grief, on the way from the exile of the waters to urban destinations (Madrid) to subsist with new activities outside the rural life of the evicted. " That same pain exemplified by Aunt Asuncion in the students' cluedo.
Until its expropriation, Granadilla was a prosperous agricultural town that reached 1,126 inhabitants. Its entrails, many of them in ruins, are a reflection of the complex history that it supports, despite its limited surface, about 85 km2. The wall built with river edges is one of the great attractions, and reveals its Muslim foundation. "The oval radio-concentric plane around the main square belongs to the medieval Christian re-foundation by Fernando II de León in 1,170," says María Pámpano, author along with Antonio José Campesino Fernández of several university research works on the area, Offer tour de Granadilla and Valley of the Ambroz and Resources and tourism products in the Valley of the Ambroz-Trasierra and Tierras de Granadilla.
Baptized in its origin as Granada, everything points to the fact that it was the Catholic Monarchs who changed their name to the current one after the conquest of Andalusian territory to avoid confusion. Its historical wealth and cultural heritage was reinforced with the ownership of the Villa by I duke of Alba de Torres. The Castilian nobleman carried out the fortification of the wall of almost a kilometer in perimeter and ordered the construction of the monument that crowns the entire town, a medieval castle built by Juan Carrera and Tomás Bretón between 1473 and 1478.
"According to Professor María Cruz Villalón, it consists of a central prismatic body and four semi-cylinder bodies attached to each side. It was carried out in good quality stonework and consists of internal vaults on the three floors of the building ”, indicate Pámpano and Campesino Fernández. In the 16th century the parish church of Nuestra Señora de La Asunción would be built, “with a single nave with three sections separated by arches on pilasters and an octagonal head, covered with Gothic ribbed stone vaults. It has two doors: a Gothic one to the northwest, and a post-Herrerian one to the southwest of the 17th century ”.
Organized civil construction within walls - without external suburbs, as the researchers point out - is another of its great attractions, and concentrates the most representative buildings in the Plaza Mayor. In times of covid – 19, Sergio Pérez guides us with a telephone visit. “The first thing you should do when you get to Granadilla is go up to the tower. From there, you will see an impressive panoramic view of the entire town and surroundings. Then, walk the wall to enjoy its views of the swamp and the interiors of the villa. Then take the main street and reach the center of the town to see the popular houses and the Town Hall. In less than two hours and without haste you do it. ” Among its popular architecture, a pink house known as La Casa de las Conchas attracts attention . Its name is due to the multitude of mollusks that decorate its facade. "There is a great homogeneity in the farmhouses, since they have one or two floors and a rough, uncovered slate masonry structure," describe the researchers.
After the Historic Artistic Complex of the Villa de Granadilla was recognized in 1978, restoration works were undertaken on the castle and the walls. Carried out by the architects Juan Antonio Espejel, Eduardo Navarro and Jacinto Pico, and financed by the General Directorate of Architecture of the Ministry of Public Works and Urban Planning, the project ended in 1983. In the words of Pámpano and Campesino Fernández, it was “of very dubious justification and arguable architectural aesthetics, both aiming at the consolidation and recovery of two basic elements of the Villa's urban structure and setting a positive precedent for the future ”.
The arrival of the Experimental Plan for Reconstruction and Restoration of Abandoned Villages a year later would fill the town with young people who sought to make contact with this rural environment, as real as theirs but much more remote than that of the cities. A program that is still active and that is not received in the same way by its former inhabitants. "Some are hurt and I understand it, because they see young students dancing on a balcony that perhaps was that of their mother's house," says Sergio Pérez. “Others, on the other hand, thank us for the work. By giving life to the town and keeping it afloat we avoid its collapse. ”
This meeting between two very different generations of the same Spain occurs on November 1 All Saints' Day and on August 15 during the feast of La Asunción, its patron saint. A few days "for coexistence" as Eugenio points out, in which they chat in front of an aperitif preceded by a mass in the church. For a few hours, that town that Pedro Almodóvar immortalized in his film Átame (1989) seems to belong again to his last heirs. With the association almost extinguished, Eugenio launches precisely to the Manchego director one last wish: "that he make known the history of Granadilla, because what happened here is worthy of one of his films."