Fernando.

Fernando works in a renovated stone building three kilometers from Trujillo. It was once a livestock barn, then a forge, and now it's workshop, home, and the place where he spends ninety percent of his life. The anvil in the building weighs a hundred and twenty kilos and carries the marks of three generations: his grandfather Eustaquio's, Fernando's own since he was fifteen, and whatever each new piece leaves on the surface as it passes over.

The forge was Eustaquio's. Fernando started going alone after losing him, to finish the pieces that had been left half-done. He knew where the hammer was and how to heat iron to the right temperature so it would bend without breaking. At eighteen he opened the workshop with his grandfather's tools. His first real commission came at twenty: two four-meter gates with holm-oak motifs for a renovated estate, found by an architect who tracked him down because a local cattle farmer said a phrase that still works as a reference.

Every piece starts from a pencil sketch on brown paper. He draws three versions before lighting the forge. "I'll let you know" is what he says when asked when it'll be ready. He might take two days to send a quote, because he needs to think. He makes decisions slowly.

The anvil's surface is marked by thousands of accumulated blows over decades. Each mark tells something — a gate for a wedding, a lock for a farmhouse, a hinge for a door that had been stuck for thirty years. Fernando hasn't polished it or replaced it. He uses it as it came to him, with the weight and the scars of everything that passed over it before him.

The workshop porch is reached by a dirt track off the Trujillo road. There's a hammock where Fernando takes a nap between half past two and half past four, without exception. View over the oak scrubland: scattered holm oaks, pastureland, dry-stone walls. The smell is wild rosemary, which grows at the workshop door, and coal when the forge is lit.

Fernando is an artisan blacksmith. He forges gates for oak-scrubland estates, locksmithing for farmhouses and tools no one makes anymore. What he looks for in his pieces is that they last. That someone uses them fifty years from now and they still work.