Miguel de la Quadra Salcedo was an idol for everybody in Spain for decades. But I was only a very small child when he first jumped to our TVs as a first class reporter and war correspondent. In my formative years my hero was, instead, the naturalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente (more on him in another post later on). Only now, after Miguel’s death in 2016, I have deeply identified with him and adopted him as my new hero.
Because I share with him his most defining facet, that of the explorer, always in search of something far beyond. Just as Franco Battiato!
The small nuance is that, while Battiato’s was a purely spiritual quest, Miguel, although strongly motivated by his early Christian education, moved always in the side of history and culture, he was a classic European humanist.
He devoted his last 38 years to Ruta Quetzal, a program that every year brought hundreds of teenagers through selected routes in Spain and the Americas. He was clear: not merely a cultural or educative activity, but a path of initiation that should propel these youngsters in their societies for the rest of their lives.
That was Miguel!
