Tour audio A walk with Unamuno around Béjar

When Unamuno arrived in Salamanca in 1891, he came from Bilbao. He had spent his university years in Madrid, a city he never quite liked. Bilbao was his point of reference, the city of his childhood and his youth, of his wife and his friends, a city full of workers, and of mountains and valleys around which he would go on excursions.

When he had already been living in Salamanca for over ten years, he wrote: «Shortly after I arrived in this old and now much-loved city of Salamanca —a city of about thirty thousand souls—, I wrote to a friend and told him that, if after two years here he found out that I played card games every day, walked around the main square for two or three hours and took naps, he could give me up for lost; but if after that time I continued studying, meditating, writing and publicly fighting for culture, he could conclude that I was much better here than I was in Madrid. And, indeed, this is what happened» (1908).

In Salamanca he found a new and different landscape for him: the life of Castile and the social and university atmosphere that his preoccupations required. It did not take him long to discover in Béjar the elements that were lacking in Salamanca and that he missed from Bilbao: the mountain hikes, the green valleys, the complicity of the struggling working classes and the time off during holidays, surrounded by friends, in the haven of peace of the mountains. Béjar became his second home.

We will present here the places in Béjar and its surroundings that were part of the experience of Unamuno, and how they were portrayed in his writings.