Existential Activism

How a forgotten Spanish province put itself back on the map by Trey Popp in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
To be or not to be. That seemed to be the question for Teruel, a tiny province in south central Spain, and it looked like only a matter of time before a negative verdict would be rendered. Despite a capital handsome enough to merit designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the outlook was grim. A hundred years of population decline had shrunk the citizenry by more than 40 percent. The roads and railways were decrepit. Educational opportunities at the university level were limited and the healthcare infrastructure was third-rate. As more people abandoned the province to seek fortune elsewhere, the national government saw fewer reasons to shore up services for those who remained. To make matters worse, although the economy was depressed, technically the area was rich enough to be exempt from European Union development aid, which has flowed largely into Eastern Europe in recent years. Tourists weren't even coming, despite a landscape dotted with Moorish fortifications straight out ofOne Thousand and One Nights.
Teruel was being roundly ignored. So a group of citizens banded together with the determination to turn things around. Enough was enough. Following a brainstorming session, they rallied around a simple slogan, a motto invested with hopes of ressurection and phrased with perfect simplicity: "Teruel Exists." Bumper stickers, T-shirts and posters were printed up. They began to pop up here and there, confronting Spaniard with a curt, straightforward memo. Teruel Exists. It was 1999. Teruel remained the only province in Spain without a direct rail connection to Madrid. (All the others had been hooked up for more than a century.) The government was proposing to shut down the lone railroad connecting the city of Teruel to Valencia and Zaragoza. And that wasn't on account of quality highways, either; there wasn't a centimeter of fourlane blacktop in the realm. The group chose to inaugurate their campaign with a sly demonstration: a five-minute period of symbolic silence. Townspeople were invited to express solidarity and the capital fell into a hush. Eighty percent of its inhabitants had turned out. As more than 20,000 people sealed their lips, bells tolled in church towers all over the province to mark its abandonment. But the silence wouldn't last long. The Monty Python of political pressure groups had just been born. ** The southerly journey to Teruel from Zaragoza, the state capital of Aragon, crosses a high plain that is forbiddingly hot and dry in summer. Sun-baked stretches of grain alternate with undulating fields of red clay scored with tiller ruts. Desiccated grasses prickle the hedgerows. Even aboard an air-conditioned passenger train (which the Teruel Exists committee has succeeded in saving), the parched conditions outside provoke a feeling of unease. The whistlestop stations are small and squat and some of them are deserted. Shade is a rarity. And then, suddenly, a thick band of poplars springs up to frame the bed of a modest creek, announcing the town of Teruel the way date palms herald a Saharan oasis. The traveler is enveloped in a completely new mood. The train depot lies at the base of rocky promontory upon which the old town sits like a crown. The scattershot schedule of arrivals requires a measure of alertness of the station master; the switching gates must be opened and closed by means of a hand crank. Next door, in the Casa La Amalia, where coffee-minded men in their middle years sit quietly at the bar while teenaged girls sip fizzy drinks at crowded round tables, I found a bulletin board on one wall. The sale of two horses was being announced. A digital picture of the equine pair floated alongside a cell phone number. Ham haunches hung from ceilings and walls of half the shops in town. Insofar as Spaniards know of Teruel's existence, residents have the country's butchers to thank. Teruel does ham like Idaho does potatoes - or more precisely, like Vidalia, Ga., does onions: the stuff is top-notch. In the eating establishments of the old town, pigs feet were cinched in vice clamps; bartenders shaved thin slices of cured meat so translucent they resembled shards of rose-colored stained glass. The central plaza hummed with people eating and drinking in the midweek lull of Teruel's bull-running festival. The local paper featured a stupendous photograph of a bullfighter frozen in midair, his body parallel to the ground, hovering over the horns of his adversary. The Angel's Leap. Soon the square emptied for siesta. Later, near sunset, a triumphant matador in silver-threaded finery rolled away from the old coliseum in a white minivan, the palms of admirers plastered to its untinted

windows. Families poured out of the grandstands, the men swinging empty coolers and holding their children's hands. On the corner, a cluster of ancient women sat on a park bench, acknowledging one another's gentle soliloquies by softly repeating, "Of course, of course..." This is the town Francisco Juarez is trying to save. We sat together in the second story of a nondescript building surrounded by the ubiquitous brick and stone facades of the old town. Juarez has been involved with the Teruel Exists committee since its beginning nearly six years ago. An unassuming man whose eyes flash with boyish good humor behind a pair of spectacles whenever he recollects one of the group's wry publicity coups, he makes a perfect spokesman for an organization that has no hierarchy and whose membership ranges from several dozen to several tens of thousands, depending on how you measure it. Seeking to preserve and fortify the place he calls home, he has been on the organizing end of escapades that run the gamut from political action to absurdist theater. "We became nationally famous when a group of people went to Madrid dressed up in medieval costumes. In Teruel there is a legend of two lovers, one of whom died because his passion was unrequited," he says. The costumed troupe commandeered a public square in Spain's capital and performed an updated version of the story, enacting the death of the Teruel province itself. More protests were called, and soon the movement was gathering momentum. Sales of bumper stickers and T-shirts emblazoned TERUEL EXISTS! raised enough money for the pressure group to stage the performance before the EU headquarters in Brussels. Meanwhile, their antics had inspired imitation. Juarez and his allies found that they were not the only ones dissatisfied with the status quo in central Spain. At the end of April 2000, the committee put together a protest bicycle ride from Teruel to Madrid by way of Cuenca, another town sick of being ignored. Both contingents rallied for inclusion in Spain's high-speed train network, the AVE. A third group joined them. "Zamora Also Exists." Irritated by the lack of results, Teruel Exists called a general strike in November, which led to the largest gathering of humanity in Teruel since the Spanish Civil War. The movement was on the map. The strike was news, but what Juarez and his compatriots had begun to master was something far more challenging and creative. Given their fundamental complaint - which was that not enough was happening to improve Teruel's lot - gaining press coverage was an insoluble problem. Newspapers cover, well, news. Quiet little Teruel was like the proverbial tree in the forest whose collapse nobody hears. The trick was somehow to produce a kind of news designed to alert people to the fact that no news was taking place. In response to the national government's repeated and empty promises for a four-lane highway connecting Teruel to Valencia - a nonstory if ever there was one - the group hatched a plan. Beating it out to a stretch of countryside through which the road would presumably pass, they promptly built one meter of the thoroughfare. Cameras snapped as the white dotted lines were painted and a mock politician cut a ceremonial ribbon to the tune of live band. "Once we sent thousands of postcards to the German ambassador in Spain asking for asylum - not political but economic asylum," Juarez recalls with a mischievous smile. "People here have a good sense of humor," adds Javier Hinojosa, an English teacher and translator who happily gives his time whenever the committee calls. "On New Year's Eve this year, we celebrated as if we were going to enter 1957. Everybody yelled, 'Hey, 1957! It's 1957!' As if we were still in the past." Neither man thinks to comment upon it, but the choice of 1957 reveals one of the group's core beliefs: that, having been largely passed over by some of the unfortunate development trends of the last few decades, Teruel has an opportunity to get it right in a way that other parts of Spain have not. Sustainable development. Smart growth. The conservation of their environment and culture. Teruel Exists has begun to accomplish some of its original goals. It forestalled the closure of the existing railroad, has won several mobile emergency intensive care units and gained a mental hospital. It has earned a dedicated line item for Teruel in the EU development budget. The first 37 kilometers of a four-lane highway have been opened. Now it's trying to repulse some of the businesses that have been eying the province's cheap land and labor. The group wants to attract industries that don't just exploit the province's natural assets - which range from coal and alabaster to ham and peaches - but add value to them before shipping them to the rest of the Spain and beyond. "One of the risks we're running now is that some companies want to open dumps for toxic refuse here. Some of our villages want companies to come," Juarez says, "but we're not a rubbish bin."

Elected officials may have been ineffectual at convincing the outside world of that, but Teruel Exists is making headway. Indeed, it may be on its way to becoming a model for regions facing similar problems much farther afield. "In the middle of France, there's an area which has been depopulated very quickly," Juarez mentioned as our conversation drew to a close, "and they have gotten in touch with us to find out more about our methods." He couldn't remember its name - proof positive that it's a prime candidate. It and any number of similar regions around the world have plenty to learn, and it just may start with figuring out how to produce news from an absolute vacuum. Before we parted ways, Juarez showed once again that Teruel Exists is the undisputed champion in that regard. As we bellied up to a nearby bar and ordered a round of beers, he picked up his cell phone and summoned a reporter from the Heraldo de Aragon, the state's biggest newspaper. Not long afterwards, she turned up, snapped a photo and asked me a few questions. Three days later, there it was on page 14, headline and picture and everything. "Teruel Exists [has received attention] from people in Finland, Germany, the Republic of Congo and two separate countries in South America," Juarez was quoted as saying, but word of the town had yet to spread to the United States. At least, not yet. It would take a second story, filed a few thousand miles away, to accomplish that. Trey Popp is a Philadelphia-based reporter and a contributing writer at Dragonfire.

To be or not to be. That seemed to be the question for Teruel, a tiny province in south central Spain, and it looked like only a matter of time before a negative verdict would be rendered. Despite a capital handsome enough to merit designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the outlook was grim. A hundred years of population decline had shrunk the citizenry by more than 40 percent. The roads and railways were decrepit. Educational opportunities at the university level were limited and the healthcare infrastructure was third-rate. As more people abandoned the province to seek fortune elsewhere, the national government saw fewer reasons to shore up services for those who remained. To make matters worse, although the economy was depressed, technically the area was rich enough to be exempt from European Union development aid, which has flowed largely into Eastern Europe in recent years. Tourists weren't even coming, despite a landscape dotted with Moorish fortifications straight out ofOne Thousand and One Nights.
Teruel was being roundly ignored. So a group of citizens banded together with the determination to turn things around. Enough was enough. Following a brainstorming session, they rallied around a simple slogan, a motto invested with hopes of ressurection and phrased with perfect simplicity: "Teruel Exists." Bumper stickers, T-shirts and posters were printed up. They began to pop up here and there, confronting Spaniard with a curt, straightforward memo. Teruel Exists. It was 1999. Teruel remained the only province in Spain without a direct rail connection to Madrid. (All the others had been hooked up for more than a century.) The government was proposing to shut down the lone railroad connecting the city of Teruel to Valencia and Zaragoza. And that wasn't on account of quality highways, either; there wasn't a centimeter of fourlane blacktop in the realm. The group chose to inaugurate their campaign with a sly demonstration: a five-minute period of symbolic silence.