I usually say to Jose Mari Carrascosa that he is the best communication director in Spain. Your budget is zero; his product, ethereal, and yet manages to appear regularly on television and, from time to time, on the cover of some Sunday supplement. We fans read with pleasure their corporate magazine, where Julio Llamazares or Abel Hernández write (for free); we gladly allow you to spam us on WhatsApp every Wednesday announcing a new episode of your podcast; we buy every promotional t-shirt, mug or comic; we put money into crowdfunding; we give away hours of work by helping out at fairs; we drive hours to listen to Mercedes Álvarez and Isabel Goig in their cultural days.
Sometimes, when we meet, I insist to him that there are companies in the Ibex with entire communication departments and large marketing budgets that have never achieved even a fraction of this. He laughs and says that he’s just a pre-retired technician from Telefónica and that we’ll see when I get them to La Vanguardia. He is ambitious: I promise him one column and he says they deserve five.
He is the president of the Association of Friends of Sarnago, a town in the Tierras Altas de Sória that was completely uninhabited in 1979 when the last neighbor died. I’d say it’s the great icon of depopulation ground zero if it weren’t for the fact that this sinister title is hotly contested. For several years, a person has returned to live there in the winters, and the summers are full of children and grandchildren of the village. The emigrants from Sarnague have one of the best skies that exists, the beautiful motto “land of no one, land of all”, a festival starring Celtiberian priestesses and a Numantine stubbornness thanks to which they have been saving their town from ruin for decades.
The people of Sarnague are now building a coworking space to attract people who want to live and work there seasonally. The project had European funds that they have not granted, but it has been the same for them and they have taken the shovels themselves in a few days of voluntary community work called hacenderas. I understand the success of the “Sarnago brand”, because Jose Mari has something that the rest of the dircoms lack: the smallest and biggest mission in the world, that his town does not disappear.
