Fernando.

Fernando's workshop is three kilometers from Trujillo, at the edge of the oak scrubland. The scrubland begins where the track ends: holm oaks within arm's reach when you step out the door. Scattered holm oaks, pastureland turning yellow in August, dry-stone walls, granite water troughs that have been there longer than any neighbor. The smell of wild rosemary grows at the workshop entrance. And when the pressure builds — because it does build —, Fernando pulls on his boots and walks eight or ten kilometers toward the Sierra de Santa Cruz, no phone and no fixed destination.

There's a specific holm oak four kilometers from the workshop. It has a hollow trunk. Fernando has sat there since he was eight years old. Nobody else knows about that spot, except one person. The hollow is big enough to sit with your back against the wood. He doesn't do anything special: he stays still until something that was tight loosens up.

The oak scrubland of Extremadura is an ecosystem where holm oaks grow apart from each other, livestock grazes in stretches measured in hectares and the silence has a specific texture: cicadas in summer, wind through dry branches in winter, a distant cowbell. Lynxes, imperial eagles, bulls with black coats that Fernando watches on his walks live there. Always from a distance.

Trujillo's climate is extreme continental Mediterranean. Forty-two degrees in July. Frosts that crack the ground in January. That climate forces you to organize or it crushes you: heavy work gets done first thing, when the air is still cool. The forge goes on at half past six in the morning because by two in the afternoon the heat inside the stone building is hard to bear. At half past two, nap. Without exception. On the workshop porch, in a hammock facing the oak scrubland. Until half past four. The world stops and starts again.

Extremadura's rhythms have a cadence you don't understand until you live it: breakfast at ten, lunch at three, dinner at ten at night. The market in Trujillo is on Thursdays. Fernando goes into town in his old Nissan Patrol to pick up orders, buys vegetables at Elena's stall — who saves him the best tomatoes since he forged her a garlic hook years ago — and closes some deals of the kind that in Extremadura are closed with a handshake. The rush hour on the square lasts forty minutes. Then everyone back to their own.

What conditions Fernando most about the place where he lives doesn't appear in the tourist guides: at three in the afternoon in August there is absolutely no one on the street. Not even tourists. And that emptiness, that long pause forced by the sun, is exactly what his body needs to function.