Rebeca Ramos

Rebeca Ramos is a television news presenter whose investigation of San Esteban’s biomass power project transforms a local political dispute into a televised confrontation. First encountered through her repeated calls to Víctor and then as a reporter who arrives without a production crew, she becomes the agent who challenges Irene’s account of the plant and exposes a revised agreement that Irene did not know about. Her role also links investigative journalism to the novel’s less dignified economy of celebrity and private scandal.

Identity and Arrival

Rebeca is identified by Bea as the presenter of the television news. Her name first acquires personal significance when Víctor is asleep beside Bea in a hotel room: his phone rings, and Bea sees repeated unanswered calls from Rebeca Ramos. The discovery makes Bea wonder whether Rebeca is the woman who had been trying to reach him the previous afternoon and what their relationship is. The episode places Rebeca inside Bea’s unsettled history with Víctor before she appears in person.

Rebeca later arrives in San Esteban amid photographers and journalists gathered around a car near the Hotel Cantábrico. Bea initially expects Víctor to emerge, but instead sees a woman whose familiar hair and turn toward the press reveal that it is the news presenter. Irene subsequently tells Bea that Rebeca had come to the village the previous day with her boyfriend for a few days’ holiday. According to Irene, Rebeca said she had happened upon the commotion over the power plant by chance and, because she was committed to her work, decided the subject could make a compelling first investigative programme. The account connects Rebeca’s personal visit with the professional attention that soon turns toward the town.

The Investigation of the Biomass Project

The dispute Rebeca investigates has already divided the community. Irene supports the plant as a source of clean, inexpensive energy, employment, and electricity, and argues that the project could allow the region to rely less on fossil fuels. Opponents, by contrast, accuse her of betraying Cantabria by failing to protect its trees. An earlier newspaper report shown to Bea alleged that Irene had threatened two landowners with expropriation if they would not sell their trees for the biomass factory. That report sharpened the political stakes surrounding the project before Rebeca’s interview.

Rebeca first approaches Irene through flattery, according to Bea’s account, but changes her manner once the cameras begin recording. In the interview, later identified as part of a programme called La verdad de la energía verde, she presses Irene with questions about the practical and environmental costs of biomass power. Her challenges include the fossil fuels consumed by trucks transporting forest material, the waste left after combustion, the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions, and the amount of woodland needed to supply it. She also counters the promised benefits with examples of plants that had closed, the heavy subsidies required to sustain some facilities, and employment outcomes that fell far below what had been promised.

The questioning moves from the technology to the politics behind the project. Bea understands Rebeca’s questions as resembling arguments supplied by the opposition and Irene’s ex-husband. When Irene denies that pollution-control specifications have been weakened, Rebeca produces a copy of the agreement on her iPad showing that the relevant parameters had been changed. Irene, who had not known of the alteration, is caught unprepared. Rebeca then frames the plant as putting profit ahead of neighbours’ health and accuses Irene’s left-wing government of supporting and promoting an exploitative industry. Irene’s angry denial leaves her struggling to defend herself, turning the interview into a public defeat as well as a disclosure about the project’s governance.

Private Connections and Public Spectacle

Rebeca’s professional presence is entangled with Bea’s private life. The unanswered calls to Víctor make Bea suspect a continuing connection between them; later, when Rebeca arrives before the press in San Esteban, Bea recognizes the presenter and understands that her presence may affect Víctor’s place in the village. The evidence leaves the precise status of their relationship unstated, but connects Rebeca both to Víctor’s private world and to the public attention surrounding Bea.

That attention intensifies during a demonstration against the power plant. Bea finds herself followed by photographers and television crews and sees Rebeca reporting on the protest with a microphone and camera operator. Bea imagines the chain of consequences linking her own history with Víctor to the crisis around her family: without their encounter, she thinks, she would be preparing for her wedding, the demonstration might not be taking place, Irene might not be close to losing the mayoralty, and Diego might not be close to losing his fortune. The moment shows how personal scandal, political conflict, and economic jeopardy converge under the press’s gaze.

Narrative Role

Rebeca’s investigation makes competing definitions of the biomass project visible. Irene presents it as green development and local progress; opponents see damage to the forest and a political bargain; Rebeca’s questions recast its environmental claims as matters requiring scrutiny and its revised agreement as evidence with immediate political consequences. The interview’s force comes not only from its subject matter but from the change in Irene’s knowledge: the mayor learns on camera that the agreement has been altered without her awareness.

The novel also places Rebeca within a media environment where serious reporting and sensational coverage coexist. At the protest, Bea concludes that the journalists following her might be diverted from the ecological story if she can give them a more salacious one. She calls Rebeca by name, apparently intending to seize control of the coverage, but the available scene ends with that appeal rather than showing what follows. Rebeca thus stands at the point where public-interest journalism meets the appetite for private drama, while the outcome of Bea’s attempted intervention remains unresolved.