Nineteenth-century tools
On the workshop wall there's a cast-iron Roman plow Fernando restored when he was thirty-two. He found it in an abandoned farmhouse near the Sierra de Montánchez: four months of cleaning and treatment. He didn't sell it. He hung it up. When asked why, he says: "Because someone made it to last. And it lasted."
That phrase sums up how he works. Fernando keeps nineteenth-century tools that still function. Not out of nostalgia or decoration: because they're well made and do what they need to do. A bellows that's moved air for over a hundred years, a set of tongs with the handle worn exactly at the point where the hand falls. Things that last interest him more than new things.
At ten years old he made his first piece alone: a hook for hanging cured ham. It took four days and seven attempts. His grandfather didn't correct him once — he just watched. The hook holds eight kilos of ham and is still in his mother's kitchen. Twenty-six years.







