Malas Tierras (The Badlands)
"We are orphans of our land, stripped of a past to look back on.
The waters of orchestrated progress drown the memories of a people, while hiding the dust of dead and barren terrain.
Each drought brings back a corpse.
These bad lands are all that remains."
Few landscapes are as desolate as those revealed by the receding waters in many of the Spanish reservoirs.
The Almendra reservoir on the Tormes River, one of the largest in Spain, located between the provinces of Zamora and Salamanca, turns into an immense desert of sand, rocks, and dry trees with each drought.
I traverse its arid lands to find the remains of those villages that were submerged under the water, their buildings, streets, and cemeteries. I walk for hours with my camera on my shoulder, searching for the right position of the sun to highlight the textures of the stones, bare of moss and lichens, and of the trunks of the dead oaks, these oaks that seem to me like macabre sculptures, yet terribly beautiful.
There is a magnetic attraction for me in this dead land that once harbored so much life.
