Spanish views from a small town

Twenty years ago, a well-to-do couple from Santiago de Compostela adopted a Chinese girl from an orphanage. The girl was one of the first Chinese children adopted in Galicia, and her parents were interviewed various times, reporters wanting to know what led to their decision, and if her obvious origin was an impediment or not. The years passed, and the girl attended high school, a year ahead for her age. She was a gifted musician, and a brilliant student. But, one day, just after the beginning of the school year, she went missing. A search party was set in place, and she was found, just up the road from her mother's family house in nearby Teo, dumped on a shoulder of the road. Everyone was despondent that such a lovely girl had obviously been killed by a soulless person. But the police had their eye on someone, and just after the funeral, they arrested her adoptive parents, divorced just that year. Their story was contradictory with the evidence the police found, and they were e...

Fourteen years ago, a well-to-do couple from Santiago de Compostela adopted a one-year-old girl from a Chinese orphanage. They had obviously passed all the tests that couples who want to adopt have to go through and were allowed to bring the child home to raise as their own. They happened to be the first couple in the area to adopt a Chinese child (since then there have been many such international adoptions, including a couple neighbors of mine). They were even interviewed for a news program when the girl was six years old. They were a happy family, walking through the medieval center of Santiago. The child was happy. The parents were happy, too, and mentioned that adoption was just the same as having a child of their own, that it was something that would be permanent, "for the rest of our lives," as they mentioned in the interview.  Everything seemed to go well until the parents divorced and the mother got custody of the child. The mother became depressed. One day two years...

There is a little village in the province of Badajoz, region of Extremadura, right on the edge of northwestern Andalucía, that is a typical southern Spanish village. It has a little over a hundred inhabitants and consists of a long street with a few outlying streets. It's houses are mostly white and rarely higher than two floors. It's in a very backward area, historically speaking; electricity first appeared in the seventies and running water and paved streets in the eighties. The main income is from olive trees, wheat, and sheep herding. I've never been there, but I assume it is a tranquil place. But its name is synonymous with terror. It is the place where the largest massacre since the twenties took place, in 1990. It's called Puerto Hurraco. The story has elements from the Hatfields and the McCoys and from the Capulets and the Montagues. That is probably why it has made its way into the folklore of la España negra , black Spain, stories that seem to come from a de...