25 km of forest in Spain's meseta debunk the dry-plain myth

The steppe said to hate trees was hiding a 25 km forest

While two days of storms battered the northwest of Spain's northern sub-plateau, a walk through the woods next to the local village produced a figure that unsettles the cliché: 25 kilometres of continuous forest, without a single house, road or hypermarket along the entire route. The image of the meseta as a dry, barren plain wobbles the moment you realise that the famous hatred of trees is, at the very least, not directed at the whole territory.

The stereotype has a long life. "The dry and arid plateau" is the mental picture used to describe much of inland Spain. But those 25 km of forest are no manicured garden: they are a continuous forest corridor, with no interruptions. Someone who has walked the meseta from north to south and diagonally, on four occasions, argues that the real landscape and its people do not fit the cliché. And there the conversation drifted elsewhere.

The drift led to La Sagra, a district in the province of Toledo that some call "the worst area in Spain". The claim is that in its villages the economy of subsistence lives off benefits and that the presence of immigrants has changed local life. Statements like these mix a real social problem —rural dependence on public aid— with a demographic reading that often borders on prejudice. The crossing between landscape and prejudice is an old one, but here it popped up in a conversation about trees.

The forest, meanwhile, is still there. Those 25 km of woodland are not the exception that proves the rule, but a reminder that Spain is a country of contrasts and that the "hatred of trees" was perhaps just an excuse to avoid talking about what really matters: depopulation, emptied-out rural Spain and, above all, how easily a geographical debate turns into a trench war.