There is a view of the church of El Salvador in Lagartera portrayed from the south, which is much loved by photographers and artists.
The first photo is from a postcard from 1912. It shows the bell tower of the church, and a group of Lagarterans dressed in the traditional costume of the village. You can see the Sierra de Gredos in the background, as a silhouette. This photo is now in the Sorolla Museum in Madrid. It is not known who the photographer was. Perhaps he was one of Sorolla’s companions during the time he was painting in Lagartera.
The second picture is a watercolour lovingly painted and signed by the painter, E Lawrence. On the back of the painting, the date 1965 is written. Little is known about Lawrence. He was probably English, because the painting was found in an art shop in England. Perhaps he was a pensioner who spent his leisure time painting. Most probably he never came to Lagartera, because the painting is a copy of the following photo:
This photo is from the book Spain: Landscapes, Monuments, Traditions; a collection of photos from the Swiss photographer, Martin Hürliman (1897-1984). The German edition was published in 1954, so the photo probably dates from the early 1950s or late 1940s. You can see that the upper window of the house opposite us is larger than in 1912, and has a balcony, and where there was a door below, now there is another window.
Hürliman was well known as a photographer, and also founded a branch of the German publishing house Atlantis Verlag in Switzerland, taking over the Orbis Terrarum series, which had been previously published by Ernst Wasmuth, a German specialist in art, design, architecture and archaeology. The Orbis Terrarum project consisted of publishing high-quality reproductions of photos from around the world. Kurt Hielscher’s (1881-1948) book, Unknown Spain, was one of the first publications in the Orbis Terrarum series, and published in Germany in 1922.
Hielscher took several photographs in Lagartera, and was an important influence on the Spanish photographer, José OrtÍz Echagüe (1886-1980), who had strong links with the village. Because Hürliman, took over Orbis Terrarum, he would have known Hielscher’s work well, and that is probably why he came to Lagartera.
It’s easy to see that Lawrence’s watercolour is a copy of Hürliman’s picture, because it’s more or less faithful to the original. What’s less obvious is that the engraving below is also a copy.
If you crop the photo, you can see that the shadows and other details are the same, only the people have been removed, the church tower is shorter, and a stork has been added to the left of the nest in the tower. The engraving is by Julio Fernández Sáez who was born in 1924, and specialised in engravings for bookplates. He was very productive in the 1950s and early 1960s. It is not known who the client, Paul Pfizter, was, but there are many bookplates with his name in museums and other collections in Europe. They are dated between the 1940s and 1970s. If they are all for the same Paul Pfizter, this gentleman had an enormous collection of books.
This painting by Jim Enstone (1895-1963) is more cheerful, with bright colours and flowers on the balconies.
There are clues that Enstone’s painting is also a copy of Hürliman’s picture, and the resemblance is easier to see if you crop the painting a little to the right as has been done here. Above all, you can’t see the Sierra de Gredos, which isn’t very clear in the photo because it’s in black and white, but you can see it very well if you stand in this place in Lagartera. You can also see that the shadows in the painting are more or less the same as those in the photo.
You can see a woman and a girl in the background, as in the photo, but instead of the old man going down the slope, Enstone has painted a man with a donkey below. Enstone has chosen grey for the roof of the little house behind the donkey. As the photo is in black and white, Enstone had to imagine the colours, and apparently he got it wrong, because they were traditional terracotta-coloured tiles. In Enstone’s painting, it seems that there are two little houses, because of the way he has interpreted the colours, although the photo shows only one house. He has removed the stork’s nest from the tower. On the right, there’s considerably more detail in the grilles, and he has added a house in the foreground.
It’s possible that Enstone knew Ortiz Echagúe. Both had a common interest in aviation. As young men, they were both quite famous as military pilots. In addition to becoming a very successful photographer, Ortiz Echagüe founded Construcciones Aeronáuticas, an aircraft manufacturing company, in Getafe in 1923. Enstone worked as a businessman and civil servant, becoming an artist and designer in the last years of his life.
More than seventy years have passed since Hürliman took his photo. The streets aren’t as picturesque as they used to be, because the paving stones have disappeared, and they’ve been concreted over to make it easier to drive through the village. Even so, much has been preserved, and it’s easy to recognise some of the houses that were in Hürliman’s photo. The view of the mountains in the background, apart from being beautiful, reminds us that Lagartera is part of a wider environment. It has always interacted with other villages and towns in the region and even with cities further away.
In 1954, few Lagarterans had a car, nowadays most families have at least one. Even without cars, people used to travel a lot, using donkeys and mules for short distances. Lagarterans who were children in the 1930s remember men coming from La Vera, the slopes of the Gredos mountains in Cáceres, selling fruit and vegetables. Sardines in vats came from Madrid by train. Men from all the villages in the region would go to the station in Oropesa to collect them.
If we travel further back in time, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was an important textile factory run by friars from the Augustinian Recollects order in nearby Calzada de Oropesa. Women and girls from surrounding villages, including Lagartera, worked at home for this factory. People from Lagartera also travelled to nearby Puente del Arzobispo to buy pottery. In the more traditional houses of Lagartera there is not only a lot of inherited pottery from Puente, there’s also antique pottery from Valencia, bought by the sellers of embroideries from Lagartera when they went to Valencia to sell their wares.
The changes that Lagartera has seen reflect changes elsewhere in rural Spain, such as the collapse of rural industry, which often couldn’t compete with cheaper imports from more specialised and automated areas. In the 20th century, Calzadan women worked for Lagarteran embroidery entrepreneurs, who sold embroidered tablecloths in Madrid and in coastal resorts. It was a business that helped Lagartera a lot at the beginning of the 20th century, but the world recession of the 1980s brought a sharp fall in demand for embroideries, which had already been in decline during the 1970s.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of capital from selling embroideries was diverted to a different activity, intensive livestock farming. In the 1980s, price instability led many Lagarteran pig farmers to accept integrated contracts from the feed companies, which guaranteed prices. In the 21st century, the pressures from the big global feed companies have become obvious, and the industry has almost disappeared in Lagartera.
There’s a lot of talk about globalisation in the sense of the intensification of interactions between one locality and the rest of the world. We can see from the history of Lagartera that this is a continuous process, which began centuries ago. At a given moment, relations with the outside world can benefit an area, as happened with the arrival of photographers such as Ortiz Echagüe, who helped with the development of embroidery businesses, which in turn allowed Lagarterans to accumulate capital. At other times, these interactions can harm a locality, for example with the loss of industry in rural areas, and international pressures on Lagartera’s livestock farmers. Globalisation can bring us both good and bad at the same time, for example, hitting us as producers, but benefiting us as consumers, as we’re able to buy more varied and cheaper products. We lose our young people who emigrate in order to earn more money and become independent, but at least the youngsters have more opportunities to choose their future.
Now we’re back at the place where the postcard photo of 1912 was taken. As happens now, the traditional costume was used to ‘market’ Lagartera. In 1912, the photographer also valued the aesthetic harmony of the streets. In 1980s Madrid, there was an attempt to preserve the best of traditional buildings. In 1980s non-touristy rural areas, however, many people wanted to appear modern, not ‘rednecks’, and this led to a wave of modernisation that swept away both the good and the bad. Today, there is more respect for the past, and more appreciation for aesthetics, because it improves the quality of our lives.
Alison Lever, Lagartera, Toledo, November 2024
Modern photos: Miriam Santillana and Alison Lever
Text: Alison Lever
If you’d like to learn more:
Spanien: Bilder seiner Landschaft und Kultur (cervantes.es)