La producción geosimbólica de las HurdesTeoria, historia y práctica de un territorio imaginario

Abstract

This thesis titled La producción geosimbólica de Las Hurdes combines the tools provided by cultural and literary geography and those of myth criticism, thematology and imagology to draw a moral geography inspired by Christian thought and divided into three major continents, corresponding to images of the region as Paradise, Purgatory or Hell. To categorize a symbolic capital that ranges from the Baroque to the present, the moral geography of Las Hurdes is fractionated in a series of semantic boxes. Completed the journey from the words to the imaginary, hundreds of travelers and some of its inhabitants penetrated into the region as a New World that had to conquer, evangelize and master (at the same time, Idyll and ecosystem of the ingenuous Barbaro batueco). Those mountains were also perceived as Garden (of Eden) and Carmelite hortus conclusus, as a place of political and spiritual Exile and as a Desert inhabited only by monsters and demons. This tour ends with a descent into Hell as Land Without Bread, poor and sterile but nevertheless home of subhuman Barbaro hurdano and distorting Mirror for Spanish and foreign visitors. Finally this thesis proposes a web project that energizes and encourage cultural tourism in the region.