Half a century has passed, but María José Asensio, 58, continues to haunt the bitter memory that she lived in the first person when she was barely nine years old and that would end up marking her life and condemning thousands of people to uprooting and emigration: the machines of the powerful Francoist forestry administration began to demolish the houses of the village of Las Canalejas, in the Sierra de Segura de Jaén, in deep Andalusia.
The expropriations were initially justified to plant pine trees and prevent erosion in the basin of the Tranco reservoir, built a few years earlier, and later by the declaration of the Coto Nacional de Caza de Cazorla y Segura, predecessor of what is now the largest natural park in Spain, declared as such in 1986.
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"They threw people out of their homes to plant pine trees and put animals there for hunting," says María José Asensio with pain. His family was the last to leave Las Canalejas forcibly, and all because his father, who was the postman, no longer had anyone to deliver the letters to.
From 1951 to 1979, under the laws of Francoism, around 5,000 native mountain people were forced into exile by the expropriation policies of the Franco regime. They were families who, for generations, had maintained an ancestral way of life in harmony with nature and giving birth to an ethnographic heritage that in a short time became a valley of ruins.
Some 200 mountain people who suffered this plundering in their flesh met again on September 16 in Coto Ríos (the colonization town to which some of them were moved) to claim dignity and to celebrate the recovery of the images of their patrons, the Immaculate and the Child Jesus, saved by the neighbors from the ruins of the church of Las Canalejas.
Several citizens gathered on September 16 in Coto Ríos to support the Guijarro family. Faustino Castillo
Like Atilano Rescalvo, son of Fidela and Sinforiano, who left Los Centenares at the age of 16 and now lives in Zaragoza; or Jacinto Jiménez, 73, who has come to the reunion from Girona; or the septuagenarian brothers Fructuoso and Antonio García, from La Pobla de Farnals (Valencia), who lamented with their countrymen "the painful way" in which they were forced to leave.
"This was an outrage committed by Francoism, who threw us out of our homes to create a Hunting Reserve for Franco to come and hunt; now what they have to do is apologize publicly," says Antonio Ojeda who, after emigrating to Catalonia, lives in Espeluy (Jaén), another of the colonization towns built to house these evicted families.
On March 31, the Diputación de Jaén unanimously approved a motion urging public administrations to "recognize the memory, struggle and dignity of the families expelled from the lost villages of the Sierra de Segura, as a form of reparation for the moral damage caused". For Ildefonso Ruiz, former provincial deputy of Citizens and promoter of this declaration, "the expropriation was a story of slow suffocation of the administration, which began by denying the mountain people basic services such as health or communications and continued with a persecution of the neighbors who were fined for doing their ancestral work such as grazing or collecting firewood. "
Initially, the motion also requested that the administrations "explore the legal formulas that allow addressing a reversion of the properties forcibly taken away, so as to contribute to the maintenance of a part of the traditional heritage of Jaen". However, this point finally disappeared in order to seek consensus and before the refusal of the PP, the party that governs in Andalusia and rejects the return of what was expropriated last century.
Remains of the church of the village of Las Canalejas, abandoned half a century ago. Jose Lara
In any case, there are many mountain people who understand that full dignity can only be recovered if the State returns what was taken from them. "The fight is not over. The city council is going to be belligerent so that the nonsense that the expropriation and exclusion of these families entailed, "says Antonio Rodríguez, mayor of Santiago-Pontones (municipality to which these villages belong), who in June achieved the first municipal government for the formation Jaén Deserves More. Rodriguez insists that, if there is no reversal, "there must be an act of public reparation towards the neighbors." A reparation, he points out, that should at least stop the total disappearance of these villages.
Only the house of the Guijarro family has so far avoided the demolition of their house thanks to the fact that in 1979 they refused to sign the expropriation act. Something that has not been able to avoid the ordeal that this family lives since in 2018 the Andalusian Ministry of Environment notified them of a sanctioning file for illegal occupation, a resolution that in May 2022 was resolved by a Court of Jaén that ordered the forced eviction of the house and a fine of 2,200 euros.
"We are going to continue fighting as long as we have a thread of blood left in our veins," says Enrique Guijarro, 67, now a symbol of neighborhood resistance in the so-called lost villages. "Is it that a natural park is incompatible with the coexistence of people inside?" asks Guijarro, who claims to have deeds to his properties and announces an upcoming judicial appeal to stop an eviction that now prevents the 40 members of his family from accessing their home that has been standing for three centuries.
Those attending the concentration in Coto Ríos, convened for September 16, talking in front of the Parish of San Miguel ArcángelFaustino Castillo
The delegate of Environment in Jaén, María José Lara, with whom they met recently, said that the regional administration complies with that eviction sentence and cannot attend to the request for protection of the Guijarro. On the other hand, the family did receive the encouragement of their countrymen returned last weekend to Coto Ríos, who posed with a banner that read: "We are all Pebble family."
For the researcher Javier Morote, who is making a documentary work on the lost villages and the Segureña diaspora, "it is necessary to recover the memory of the injustices that were committed with the mountain people, who were treated as third-party citizens."
In his opinion, the file that threatens the home of the Guijarro family is an attack against the Andalusian historical heritage as it is a house of the eighteenth century and a "very valuable example of traditional mountain architecture, in danger of extinction" that, he says, should be cataloged as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC).
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