# Las Hurdes
**Las Hurdes** is a mountainous comarca (district) in the north of the province of [Cáceres, Extremadura](https://www.edgepedia.org/caceres-extremadura), Spain, on the border with [Salamanca](https://www.edgepedia.org/salamanca), historically known for its isolation and poverty and internationally known through [Luis Buñuel](https://www.edgepedia.org/luis-bunuel)'s 1933 documentary *Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan* (Land Without Bread).[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf) • [2](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Location | North of Cáceres province, bordering Salamanca; 470 km² of steep mountains and narrow valleys[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf) |
| Rivers | Batuecas, Ladrillar, Hurdano, Malvellido, Esperabán, de los Ángeles, and Alagón, all carving closed valleys[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf) |
| Settlement | 40 villages, traditionally called alquerías, grouped in five municipalities[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf) |
| Subdivision | Las Hurdes Bajas (Caminomorisco, Pinofranqueado) and Las Hurdes Altas (Nuñomoral, Casares de las Hurdes, Ladrillar)[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf) |
| Buñuel film | *Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan*, shot in spring 1933, about 27 minutes, produced by Ramón Acín[2](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/) • [3](https://filmoteca.cat/web/es/node/48931) |
| Censorship | Banned during the Republic's right-wing "Two Black Years"; sound version premiered in Paris at the end of 1936[2](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/) |
| Legacy | The film fixed a lasting image of the region as a land of misery, a stigma local residents still debate[4](https://elpais.com/gastronomia/2026-01-26/las-hurdes-93-anos-de-estigma-y-una-gastronomia-que-nunca-conto-bunuel.html) |
## Geography and settlement
The region's isolation has a physical basis. Its perimeter is surrounded by mountain ranges, and its 470 km² consist of steep, vertical mountains and closed, narrow valleys cut by the rivers Batuecas, Ladrillar, Hurdano, Malvellido, Esperabán, de los Ángeles, and Alagón. The slate substrate prevents productive use of the land, and rains run off as torrents that carry away the thin soil.[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf)
Forty population centers, traditionally called alquerías, are scattered through the area, most of them at the bottom of valleys and beside rivers because of the steepness of the mountains. They are grouped today in five municipalities: Caminomorisco and Pinofranqueado form Las Hurdes Bajas, while Nuñomoral, Casares de las Hurdes, and Ladrillar form Las Hurdes Altas, an area of nearly vertical canyons. Nuñomoral was historically the most inaccessible zone and contains emblematic alquerías such as El Gasco, Fragosa, Martilandrán, and Asegur.[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf)
Traditional architecture used local slate: rounded forms, few openings, thick walls sometimes washed with red ochre, chestnut beams, and stone slabs instead of tiles. The local writer Félix Barroso described these small houses not as a symbol of poverty but as a bioclimatic dwelling suited to the region's socioeconomic conditions.[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf)
## The black legend before Buñuel
Las Hurdes carried a reputation as a land of misery long before cinema arrived. Travel writers helped create what Spanish sources call a leyenda negra, a black legend of backwardness and destitution.[1](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf) In June 1922 King Alfonso XIII made a famous journey through the region, an event later revisited by Spanish radio as the trip that "deactivated a legend," contrasting what the monarch reportedly saw, including hunger, extreme poverty, endemic goiter, and malaria, with the region today.[5](https://elpais.com/elviajero/lonely-planet/2025-04-24/que-hacer-un-fin-de-semana-en-las-hurdes-y-los-valles-del-norte-de-caceres.html) • [6](https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/documentos-rne/documentos-rne-alfonso-xiii-hurdes-viaje-desactivo-leyenda-12-09-09/583869/)
The French geographer Maurice Legendre produced the ethnographic study *Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine* (1927), the book that later inspired Buñuel.[7](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14636204.2024.2347212)
## Buñuel's Tierra sin pan
In the spring of 1933 Luis Buñuel, then Spain's most internationally known avant-garde filmmaker after *Un chien andalou* (1929) and *L'âge d'or* (1930), filmed a short documentary in the highlands of Las Hurdes. For years the film was dated to 1932 on the basis of Buñuel's own testimony and the date given in the film's introduction, but research has established 1933 as the shooting date.[2](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/) • [8](https://revistes.uab.cat/locus/article/download/v2-mendelson/61-pdf-en/433) Catalogs give its length as 27 to 28 minutes, with some prints running longer.[3](https://filmoteca.cat/web/es/node/48931) • [9](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/crbBBj)
The production was made possible by Ramón Acín, a sculptor, teacher, and anarchist leader from Huesca and a friend of Buñuel, who financed the film with money he had won in the lottery.[3](https://filmoteca.cat/web/es/node/48931) • [10](https://cinehistoria.com/criticas/las-hurdes/) The crew combined [Spaniards](https://www.edgepedia.org/spaniards) and Parisians: the photographer and cameraman Eli Lotar, the poet and journalist Pierre Unik, and the lecturer Rafael Sánchez Ventura as assistant; Buñuel directed and edited.[2](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/) • [9](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/crbBBj) Buñuel said he visited the region ten days in advance with a notebook, recording items such as "goats," "girl ill with malaria," and "there are no songs, no bread," and then filmed according to those notes; he edited the film without a Moviola, on a kitchen table with a magnifying glass.[11](https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/147068-terre-sans-pain-rushes-luis-bunuel-1932/)
**Staged scenes.** Several of the film's most shocking images were arranged. A mountain goat seen falling from a high peak was in fact shot by a crew member so that it would fall on camera, and a sick donkey was smeared with honey so Buñuel could film it being stung to death by bees.[12](https://www.imdb.com/es/title/tt0023037/) • [13](https://repositorio.ulisboa.pt/server/api/core/bitstreams/93e58563-68d1-45cc-8b24-d1ad4423f84a/content) Buñuel himself acknowledged that the film was tendencious and that Las Hurdes Bajas held nowhere near as much misery as the film suggests; nearly all of it takes place in Las Hurdes Altas.[11](https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/147068-terre-sans-pain-rushes-luis-bunuel-1932/)
**Censorship and release.** The film was censored during the "Two Black Years" (bienio negro) of the Republic governed by the right. The Republican government later gave Buñuel money to add sound, and the dubbed version premiered in Paris at the end of 1936, after the Civil War had begun, followed by releases in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Great Britain in 1937 under the French title *Terre sans pain*. A Republican coda added in 1936 later disappeared. The complete copy was not restored, in the French version and under Buñuel's supervision, until 1964.[2](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/) • [11](https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/147068-terre-sans-pain-rushes-luis-bunuel-1932/)
## Critical standing and contested image
The film has frustrated categorization. Critics have read it as a socialist-realist call to arms, a brutal parody of ethnography, and a flirtation with sadism, and some have questioned whether it is a documentary at all.[14](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/slac.12.3.295_1) Jordana Mendelson, an art historian at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has argued that the film works through a collage aesthetic of juxtaposition, closer to the dissident surrealism of [Georges Bataille](https://www.edgepedia.org/georges-bataille) and Eli Lotar's journal *Documents* (Paris, 1929–1930) than to social realism, even though 1930s Communist-sympathizing journals first presented it as an objective documentary of a poverty-stricken region.[8](https://revistes.uab.cat/locus/article/download/v2-mendelson/61-pdf-en/433) With time it has come to be seen as one of the central films of Buñuel's career and the work that completed the formation of his Surrealist vision.[2](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/)
For the people of the region the film left a wound. Dramatized scenes, including the death of a girl, children dipping bread in a stream, and the deliberately toppled goat, portrayed the hurdanos as almost inhuman figures, and the debate over the documentary's ethical limits persists locally. Raquel Antolín, president of the Asociación de Mujeres de Las Hurdes, says the film does not reflect the reality of the time, though she concedes it attracted investment; another association member, Emilia Martín, recalls that the region had fish, pigs, honey, oil, and chestnuts, and that while meat was not eaten every day, there was no famine.[4](https://elpais.com/gastronomia/2026-01-26/las-hurdes-93-anos-de-estigma-y-una-gastronomia-que-nunca-conto-bunuel.html)
## Las Hurdes today
Since the 1990s, with the arrival of tourism, the comarca has worked to shed its black legend. It now promotes its virgin olive oil, honey, traditional hurdano embroidery, and a landscape of olive groves and the meanders of the river Alagón, while its population remains heavily aged.[5](https://elpais.com/elviajero/lonely-planet/2025-04-24/que-hacer-un-fin-de-semana-en-las-hurdes-y-los-valles-del-norte-de-caceres.html) The Centro de Documentación de Las Hurdes, based in Pinofranqueado, maintains an online archive of texts, images, audio, and video to counter the legends and historical distortions accumulated about the region and to support research into hurdano culture.[15](https://www.lashurdescentrodedocumentacion.eu/)
## References
1. [Las Hurdes. Ayer y hoy de un paraíso natural (Esther de Aragón, Riomalo Rural Tourism Center)](https://www.lashurdes.com/assets/las_hurdes_mov.pdf)
2. ["Land without bread": Buñuel and the new paths of the avant-garde, IVAM](https://ivam.es/en/exposiciones/land-without-bread-bunuel-and-the-new-paths-of-the-avant-garde/)
3. [Terre sans pain (Las Hurdes), Filmoteca de Catalunya](https://filmoteca.cat/web/es/node/48931)
4. [Las Hurdes, 93 años de estigma y una gastronomía que nunca contó Buñuel, El País](https://elpais.com/gastronomia/2026-01-26/las-hurdes-93-anos-de-estigma-y-una-gastronomia-que-nunca-conto-bunuel.html)
5. [Qué hacer un fin de semana en Las Hurdes y los valles del norte de Cáceres, El País](https://elpais.com/elviajero/lonely-planet/2025-04-24/que-hacer-un-fin-de-semana-en-las-hurdes-y-los-valles-del-norte-de-caceres.html)
6. [Documentos RNE: Alfonso XIII en Las Hurdes, RTVE](https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/documentos-rne/documentos-rne-alfonso-xiii-hurdes-viaje-desactivo-leyenda-12-09-09/583869/)
7. [Las Hurdes y la Guinea española, ¿tierras sin pan?, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14636204.2024.2347212)
8. [Jordana Mendelson, Contested Territory: The Politics of Geography in Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan, Locus Amoenus 2 (1996)](https://revistes.uab.cat/locus/article/download/v2-mendelson/61-pdf-en/433)
9. [Las Hurdes (Terre sans pain), Centre Pompidou](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/crbBBj)
10. [Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan, Cinehistoria](https://cinehistoria.com/criticas/las-hurdes/)
11. [Terre sans pain (rushes), Luis Buñuel, La Cinémathèque française](https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/147068-terre-sans-pain-rushes-luis-bunuel-1932/)
12. [Tierra sin pan (1933), IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/es/title/tt0023037/)
13. [The London Film and Media Reader 3, Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa](https://repositorio.ulisboa.pt/server/api/core/bitstreams/93e58563-68d1-45cc-8b24-d1ad4423f84a/content)
14. [Christopher Kozey, Once more into the crypt: A geocritical approach to Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas 12(3), 2015](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/slac.12.3.295_1)
15. [Centro de Documentación de Las Hurdes](https://www.lashurdescentrodedocumentacion.eu/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Individual documentary short films*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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