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