Calle de Mauricio Legendre

Maurice Legendre (Paris, 1878 – Madrid, 1955) came to Spain through books and ended up making the country the centre of his life. One reading led him to Unamuno and to Salamanca, and there he found the subject that never let him go. He travelled through Las Hurdes with Unamuno on the eve of the Great War, when the region was a byword for hunger and isolation. He returned again and again, walked its villages on foot and devoted his doctoral thesis to it, the most serious study written on that land up to then. The book left its mark even on cinema: Buñuel drew on it to shoot his 1933 documentary about the region. A fervent Catholic and devotee of the Peña de Francia, he asked to rest at its foot, and there, beside the shrine near Salamanca, he was buried.