El Diario Montañés

El Diario Montañés is a local newspaper that serves as a consequential channel for political allegations and public scandal in the novel. Its articles do not merely record events: they help shape how conflicts over San Esteban’s heritage, the biomass plant, and Bea’s private life are made visible. The paper’s role is especially clear in two episodes involving sharply different subjects: Irene’s effort to return a chapel to the village and Pacheco’s reporting on the mayor’s dealings with landowners.

Local reporting and the chapel dispute

Irene recalls an article written for El Diario Montañés by Anselmo, a journalist she describes as far-right. She has kept the article framed, preserving its attack on her decision to recover the chapel. The piece cast the return of churches as a provocation by political opponents, presenting Irene’s actions as an assault on the interests of respectable people rather than as local heritage work.

That framing clashed with Irene’s explanation of why she made the chapel a personal political cause. Though an atheist, she regarded the building as the village’s heritage, and said she had promised to govern for all residents. The villagers wanted it back. The episode shows a local newspaper article entering the story not as neutral background, but as a lasting record of the resistance Irene faced—and as evidence that the chapel’s return was contested in ideological as well as practical terms.

Pacheco’s article and political pressure

Later, Pacheco tells Bea that he has found a source and directs her to an article he has published that day in El Diario Montañés. The report alleges that Irene threatened two landowners with expropriation if they did not agree to sell their trees to the biomass factory. Bea is stunned by the accusation. Pacheco presents the story as the beginning of a larger campaign, adding that Irene’s ex-husband is supplying him with information and warning that a second article, with Bea among its subjects, will be explosive.

The exchange links the newspaper’s reporting to both political opposition and personal exposure. Pacheco’s account places pressure on Irene by turning an allegation about land and tree sales into a public challenge to her conduct as mayor. His threat of another article also makes clear that Bea’s identity and circumstances may be drawn into the same campaign. The scene does not establish the allegations as independently verified; it shows what Pacheco publishes, the source he claims to have, and the leverage he expects further coverage to create.

A wider media storm

The novel later shows private and local conflicts circulating through other media, without identifying each outlet as El Diario Montañés. A hidden-camera recording from the Hotel Cantábrico exposes details of Bea’s encounter with Víctor, and a subsequent report turns her into a public subject: the former partner of a television presenter’s boyfriend, a woman who had entered his hotel room, and a member of a family already entangled in political and personal controversy. That coverage connects Bea’s breakup to Irene’s disputed biomass project and to accusations involving the rest of the family.

A televised interview with Irene intensifies scrutiny of the project. The presenter questions the environmental and economic claims surrounding biomass, raising issues of transport emissions, combustion residues, carbon dioxide, forest supply, subsidies, and promised employment. She then shifts to the political arrangements that enabled the project. This interview is not identified as a report by El Diario Montañés; alongside Pacheco’s article, however, it demonstrates how allegations and disputes move across local reporting and broadcast media.

Consequences and significance

At the demonstration against the plant, Pacheco points Bea out to journalists and photographers gathered near television cameras. Reporters crowd around her and ask whether Irene arranged her job at the biomass company. Bea’s angry exchange with a famous journalist subsequently fills heart-program coverage for a week, but it does not displace the demonstration’s central message. The protest remains prominent enough to be reported across the news, and Emerge eventually breaks its contract with the Andrada family in favor of another plant. Diego faces financial ruin, while Bea is left uncertain whether he deserves the consequences of having betrayed Irene’s trust.

The newspaper’s importance therefore lies in the part it plays in a larger struggle over attention and interpretation. Its local articles preserve a hostile framing of Irene’s heritage campaign and give Pacheco a platform for allegations that threaten to widen into a story about Bea. The novel distinguishes those articles from later, unnamed reporting and television coverage, while tracing how private scandal and contested environmental policy become entangled in public debate. In that media landscape, a story can redirect scrutiny, but it cannot necessarily redirect the crowd: Bea’s celebrity becomes a spectacle, while the protest’s claim about the plant remains the harder fact to ignore.