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The present article surveys the contribution of the writer Ramon Otero Pedrayo to the geography and history of the Galician rural world. Very prolific, he produced an extensive piece of work as a rural geographer and historian, publishing essays together with novels and short tales. As a geographer,he focused on landscape diversity and small villages as the fundamental parameters of rural population. His approach to landscape was essential for the determination of the Galician national identity. As an historian, he particularly accomplished the crisis of the traditional agrarian society and its progressive decline in the contemporary era. The disappearance of gentlemanliness in the pazo and the influence novelties exerted on the rural environment (exemplified by the road and the store of he Castilian» retailer) are the main plots in many novels and essays. Although he worked isolated and besides academic traditions, his work contains high doses of originality, either in the attention delivered to the concept of time or his ability to combine the synchrony of the space vision with the diachrony of the passage of time. Space and memory (Barrés´earth & deads) were the great axes in his way to watch the Galicia of his time.
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