La Voz de Galicia – December 6, 2024 →
Ourense is a complex city, like so many others, where numerous parallel realities coexist, often without intersecting or acknowledging one another. This week, as I sat down to watch Elías León’s documentary series about “El Circo de Los Muchachos”, I couldn’t stop thinking about precisely that. Benposta, the Cidade dos Muchachos (Boys Town), is just five kilometers from my home, and the musical circle in which I grew up took me there several times. Yet, despite being so close, my knowledge of it was limited to a little bit of its history, a little bit about Padre Silva, and a little bit of the headlines that flooded local media in the late 1990s. Watching the series, I realized I had never considered the lives of those who lived there for years—those who came from near and far to be part of an educational project that was once groundbreaking. Even though I may have crossed paths with them during my musical adolescence, I suppose I wasn’t aware enough or able to grasp the complexity of the stories of those who inhabited that place.
For me, the series serves as a fascinating metaphor for many things we consider intrinsic to our idiosyncrasy. It is also a tribute to the boys who made history traveling the world with their discipline and acrobatics. Although the story of the place that saw them grow and the trajectory of its founder will always be clouded by doubts due to its later years, I want to hold on to the idea that the other “Benpostas”—those that adapted to changing realities, like those in Colombia or the CEMU in Leganés—continue to carry out vital work inspired by the utopia that Benposta once was but is no longer.
