Costo De Vida Barcelona

Costo De Vida Barcelona

Costo De Vida Barcelona

Posted on: December 30, 2011 - 8:35 pm
by Admin

From Fact To Fame

In 2011 the Spanish author, Alicia Gimenez Bartlett, won the prestigious Nadal prize for literature with her novel, Donde nadie te encuentre. This work is all the more compelling because it faithfully recreates the true story of Teresa/Florencio Pla Meseguer, widely known during life as La Pastora. Raised as a girl, he reclaimed his male identity and was among the last of the resistance fighters against the Franco regime to be captured, after which he was accused of 29 murders and sentenced to death. Nethertheless, the astonishing history of La Pastora is virtually unknown outside Spain.

Early Life

Teresa Pla Meseguer was born into a poor family in 1917, in the small Valencian village of Vallibona in the north-east of Spain. He had a genital abnormality that would later be identified as male pseudohermaphroditism. However, his parents were so uncertain of his gender, and his mother feared how he might be treated when he came to do his compulsory military service, that the baby was registered as female. From then on, he was dressed in girl´s clothes and treated as one of the family´s daughters.

As he grew, he developed the strength and manners more typical of a boy and was bullied by his sisters because of this unusual behaviour. His family decided to send him to live with a shepherding family when he was nine years old and from then on he spent his time tending sheep and goats in the mountains. He came to know these wild regions intimately and developed a phenomenal strength that enabled him to carry an 80 kg sheep over his shoulders with ease. His affinity with this solitary lifestyle bestowed upon him the title by which he would be known throughout his life: La Pastora, or, The Shepherdess.