Julio Llamazares: “Vegamián es un símbolo, no un lugar”

Abstract

Building dams was a key element in the economic policy of Franco’s dictatorship. However, given the environmental destruction they wreaked, they too deserve to be a focus for the recovery of historical memory, according to Julio Llamazares. The Embalse del Porma, inaugurated in 1968, had direct consequences for him. Among the eight villages submerged was Vegamián, where the author was born. Loss of one’s place of origin is generally viewed as a crucial factor in making him a writer, yet the connection is an elusive one, as highlighted in this paper. Distintas formas de mirar el agua, the novel which deals with the Embalse del Porma, was not published until 2015, when the author was 60 years old. While his first two poetry collections and his first three novels describe the harsh mountain landscapes of León, he turned his attention to Vegamián thanks to the incidental, brief emergence of the village ruins from beneath the waters in 1983, in the course of a technical review. This morbid spectacle inspired the three poems of Retrato de bañista. One of these forms the basis of the script he wrote and performed in the film El Filandón (1984), shot at that haunting location by José María Martín Sarmiento. At the time this poetic testimonial remained on the margins of his work. It is revived today as an environmental memory in a technological project undertaken by a school in the small village of Boñar. QR codes located at three viewpoints along the busiest road near the dam mean that, while contemplating the beautiful landscape, whoever chooses to can hear the poet himself reciting his mournful verses, bearing trustworthy witness to what lies at the bottom of this artificial lake.

Keywords: Historical Memory, Environmental Sustainability, Dams, Spanish Literature, Transmediality