Las Hurdes

Prompted by viewing Bunuel's tendentious documentary "Las Hurdes, Tierra sin pan", I decided to venture beyond La Alberca (one of my all time favourite ethnic villages) over the regional border into the Las Hurdes area of Extremadura. Anyone harbouring illusions of an area populated entirely by inept inbreds surviving in grinding poverty, should think again. Whilst it remains a tough place to farm, the influx of tourists seeking peace and natural beauty not to mention the "Spanish Miracle" of the Franco era, has resulted in a reasonably well functioning economy notably enhanced by the friendliness of the locals. Not surprisingly they resent the stigma attributed to them in the film which is politely categorised by some as ethnographic surrealism, by others as arrant nonsense and superficial communist propaganda. This travesty of a "documentary" required the smearing of a donkey in honey so that it would be stung to death by bees, and the shooting of a goat so that it fell from the mountainside, demonstrating that they are not so fleet of foot after all. Apparently he was trying to portray a society where civilisation had scarcely developed and where the local peasants survived without recourse to even the most basic life skills. Ironically, in a non-sequitur as befits surrealist propaganda more than documentary, he ends the film by exhorting the ignorant peasants to vote for the Popular Front next time around.