Fernando Sanchez Drago

Fernando Sánchez Dragó (Madrid, October 2, 1936-Castilfrío de la Sierra, Soria, April 10, 2023) was a Spanish writer and journalist.

He was the author of more than forty books, mainly essays and novels, almost all with an autobiographical background. He also cultivated travel narration, translated books from French and collaborated in the press and on the radio. He presented and directed numerous television shows, most of them related to culture.

Biography

A living on the edge of the Ganges, in Benarés, India, transmuted the way of understanding the world of Sanchez Dragó.

Fernando Sánchez Dragó was the great-nephew of Modesto Sánchez Ortiz, director of La Vanguardia, and grandson of Gerardo Sánchez Ortiz, one of the founders of the Madrid Press Association.

He was the eldest son of Elena Dragó Carratalá from Alicante and the only and posthumous son of journalist Fernando Sánchez Monreal, who had been editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Voz, and was director and owner of the newspaper Noti-Sport and director of the Febus news agency when the Spanish civil war broke out.

Fernando Sánchez Dragó was born in the Salamanca neighborhood. As a child he spent a lot of time talking to his guardian angel, named Jai. At home they called him Nano.

At the age of five or eight he founded, directed and wrote an autograph newspaper, La Nueva España, of which several copies are preserved, a plagiarism of the newspaper ABC that he rented to the residents of the building where he lived for five cents of a peseta.

He was six years old when his mother, the day before his first day of school, took him to the cinema to see the movie The Wizard of Oz, which made him conceive that life, the world, it was a yellow brick path.

He was a student at the Colegio del Pilar in Madrid. Graduated in Romance Philology (1959) and Modern Languages, specializing in Italian (1962) and Doctor of Letters from the University of Madrid with a thesis on Valle-Inclán.

During his childhood and adolescence, he only knew about his father's death that had happened during the civil war and believed that he had been assassinated by the Republicans. However, upon entering university, he joined the Communist Party of Spain convinced by Jorge Semprún, without being a communist, to "run adventures". In 1956, while he was detained for participating in university protests, a police commissioner abruptly revealed to him that his father had died at the hands of the rebels against the Second Spanish Republic, which was a shock for him.

In the 1950s, he translated more than twenty titles of police inspector Maigret's novels and co-founded the poetic magazine Aldebaran (1954).

He was imprisoned in 1956 for instigating and participating in the Events of 1956, and again in 1958 and 1963 for his writings and ideology. In 1964, while under house arrest, he escaped into exile and returned to Spain in 1970.

In 1960, he wrote his first book, a novel, in twenty-three days, with the purpose of conquering a woman, and he succeeded. Moreover, the book would be published in 1984.

A year before escaping, in Rome, he had fallen in love with Caterina Barilli as soon as he met her.

During exile he was a press correspondent for the newspaper El Alcázar, adopting his father's name as a pseudonym.

Dragó was arrested on his return from Italy in September 1963. According to Francisco Xavier Redondo Abal, a researcher at the University of Santiago, it was the writer who, consciously or unconsciously, revealed to the Francoist police the true identity of Jorge Semprún.

On a visit to Benares, India, in March 1967, he left his hotel one early morning to watch the sunrise from one of the ghats, steps on the banks of the Ganges River that lead down to the water., and when the Sun came out he saw it "dance" and he felt intoxicated by a sacred explosion that left an indelible mark on him. This experience, "authentic fall at the gates of Damascus", motivated the conversion of "an intellectual without glasses, but glasses (...) positivist, empiricist, rationalist and critical in the Western way&# 3. 4; into a "religious man".

In 1978 he published Gárgoris y Habidis. A magical history of Spain, a work that, despite being rejected three times by publishers, was a sales success. The presentation of the work took place at the Ateneo de Madrid with interventions by Dámaso Alonso, José Luis Aranguren, (teachers of the author in his university stage) Fernando Savater, Julio Caro Baroja, Fernando Arrabal, Luis Racionero and Agustín García Calvo. In addition to the aforementioned, the work was also praised by historians such as Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Domínguez Ortiz and José Antonio Maravall, as well as by Eduardo Blanco Amor, Luis Eduardo Aute, José Saramago, Montero Glez, Eduardo Haro Ibars, Camilo José Cela, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Mario Satz, Anna Grau, Javier Sierra, Gustavo Bueno, Salvador Dalí, Jorge Verstrynge, Arturo Pérez-Reverte or Carlos Casares.

He taught at universities in Italy, Japan, Senegal, Morocco, Jordan, Kenya, the United States and Spain, as a professor of Spanish language and Spanish literature and history.

He worked on television in Italy (RAI), Japan (NHK), Televisión Española (RTVE) and Telemadrid; he collaborated with radio stations in Spain (SER, Onda Cero, COPE, EsRadio^{[< i>citation required]} and various publications by Grupo 16, the newspaper El Mundo and the magazine Época.His work as director and presenter of television programs has been distinguished by the intellectual quality of the guests and the dynamism of some of their debates.

He directed the cultural supplement "Disidencias" from Diary 16.

Between 1987 and 2001 he was director of "La Gnosis", in the Summer Courses of the Complutense University in El Escorial, Madrid.

He asked for the vote in favor of José María Aznar in the 1993 general elections.

In 1994, he began to investigate the death of his father thanks to the testimony of a Republican professor who was detained with Sánchez Monreal on the last night of his life. After several years of investigation, she came to the conclusion that his father was not murdered for political reasons, but because of a professional rivalry.

Although Sánchez Monreal was of conservative republican ideology (affiliated with Miguel Maura's party, the Conservative Republican Party), the journalist Juan Pujol Martínez, closely linked to the insurgents, denounced him as a dangerous red, for which he would be assassinated in September 1936 in the vicinity of Burgos. During the Franco regime, Pujol was appointed director of the EFE agency, created after the war by the merger of the Febus agency with two more. Dragó narrates the journey of his father, from the time he left Madrid on July 18, 1936 to report on the military uprising until his assassination, in his novel Parallel Deaths.

In 1995 he met Naoko, a Japanese woman 38 years younger than him, with whom he began a relationship from which his fourth and last child would be born in 2012.

He was a member of the jury for the Princess of Asturias Awards for Literature between 1999 and 2016.

In 2003, while traveling in Ethiopia during Holy Week, he was bitten by a mad dog in Axum. At the airport he was able to take a & # 34; mysterious plane & # 34; that he happened to leave that same day for Addis Ababa, where he received his first injection of the anti-rabies vaccine in a British clinic and informed him that it was urgent that he receive a dose of anti-rabies gamma globulin, that in Ethiopia there were only four, in the Embassy of the United States, but it was highly unlikely that they would give it to him. Willing to return to Spain, he explained his situation to the Spanish ambassador, who requested the dose from the US legation, which granted it. Sánchez Dragó attributed the granting of the dose that practically saved his life to the alliance between the Government of Spain and the United States in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Severe arterial blockage required him to undergo life-threatening triple coronary bypass surgery in February 2005. Three days after the operation he was waltzing in the hospital corridors.

In 2010, he generated a great deal of controversy when he published a book together with Albert Boadella in which Sánchez Dragó boasted of having had sexual relations with two Japanese minors under the age of 13 and of not being able to stand trial because the statute of limitations had expired. As a consequence, the union sections of the Unión General de Trabajadores, Comisiones Obreras and Confederation General del Trabajo in Telemadrid requested his dismissal, having to be defended by the then president of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre. "fiction" and was supported in a manifesto by Albert Boadella, Fernando Savater, Luis Racionero, Gustavo Bueno, María Dueñas, Montero Glez or José Luis Garci.

Since 2017, he had a romantic relationship with journalist Emma Nogueiro, 57 years his junior, and whom he met while she was doing an interview with him.

In 2018, he declared that he agreed with 90% of the Vox party program, although he defended regionalism.

He published and directed the digital weekly La Retaguardia (March 25, 2020), a project that closed after three months of activity. Regarding that media outlet, he declared that The New York Times used to lie, while his never did.

Fernando Sánchez Dragó won the Castilla y León de las Letras Award, in its 2022 edition. The jury unanimously agreed to grant him this award “for the breadth and solidity of his torrential, passionate and restless work, and always intertwined with autobiographical and visionary elements, as well as a faithful memory of an entire generation and an era". where he left an indelible mark. And his vocation to rescue the marginalized, the heterodox and the cursed of our culture ”. Finally, the special link that the author had with the province of Soria was also valued, following the literary tradition of such illustrious writers as Antonio Machado or Julián Marías”.

At the beginning of 2023, he proposed to Santiago Abascal the candidacy of Ramón Tamames to carry out a motion of censure against Pedro Sánchez. Ultimately, this did not prosper.

On April 10, 2023, he died at his home in Castilfrío de la Sierra after suffering a heart attack.

He was the father of four children from four different mothers, one of them the actress, radio presenter and writer Ayanta Barilli.

Thought

Despite his initial communist affiliation, he later defined his ideology as anarcho-individualist. His political thought stems from a heterodox and radical anarchism, composed of ideas taken from or attributable to very diverse currents: perennialism, shamanism, astrology, mysticism, hermeticism, mystery cults, esoteric Christianity based on the apocryphal Gospels., Greek philosophy (especially the pre-Socratic, Epicurean, Stoic, Cynic and Hellenistic) and Eastern religions, such as Taoism, Buddhism or Hinduism, with a staunch defense of individual rights such as life (for which opposed abortion) and private property. Yes, he declared himself, however, in favor of euthanasia.

He maintained that the Aristotelian idea that the human being is a social animal was not valid for him, because he was not sociable but lonely, which is why he lived in a town with a dozen neighbors, and that reality in the he lived was literary, not social. He affirmed that politics did not interest him and that ideologies were the & # 34; stiffness of ideas & # 34; and they made slaves. This is why he denied the polis as a concept and the social contract.

He was a professed anti-statist and declared eurosceptic, for which reason on the day of Spain's entry into the European Union (an organization that he described as a "Leninist monstrosity") he sent a telegram to the Ministry of Justice requesting "in the face of infamy and crime of high treason committed" the status of stateless person. In purity he could be considered a sui generis libertarian individualist anarchist (market anarchism). He opined against puritanism, developmentalism, multiculturalism (which he compares to the fall of the Roman Empire), goodism, progressivism, monotheistic religions and in particular Protestantism, technology, gender ideology, globalization, neoliberalism, political correctness, postmodernity, Krausism, capitalism, trash TV, the American way of life, positivism, the Industrial Revolution, materialism, economism and the consumer society.

I will tell you that being left or right, as Ortega and Gasset have already said, is one of the infinite ways of being stupid that human beings have at their fingertips. Small Western world, the fruit of monotheistic dualism. Never, no one, out of that field, in Asia, for example, has spoken to me of right or left. Never, nobody, I mean. The right, on the other hand, is developmental, as is the left, and I think the only thing that can save the world, if it can still be saved, is to stop economic growth.

In international politics, he has criticized the United States, NATO, the European Union and the UN for unleashing "all the major wars of the last twenty years", "both in Iraq, that of the extinct Yugoslavia, that of Afghanistan, that of Libya and now, if common sense does not prevent it, that of Syria." He has also accused Obama (whom he calls "warlike";) and refers to him as "that wimp from the multinationals, that puppet from the Federal Reserve, that invertebrate Don Tancredo, that fifth columnist of Muslim fundamentalism", Cameron and Hollande de "aupar Muslim fundamentalism - the Syrian rebels are, for the most part, Al-Qaida partisans - and in breaking the fragile balance" of the Middle East. He has also been in favor of Marine Le Pen, lamenting that there is no party of his characteristics in Spain, and of Vladimir Putin, supporting the Russian annexation of Crimea, a fact that he described as the "most historic event". significant since the Berlin Wall turned into rubble". He currently supports the Spanish political party Vox, stating that "in Europe there are only two opposing options for the voter: that of centripetal, conservative and sovereign identitarianism (Vox in Spain) and that of centrifugal, Europeanist, progressive and Islamizing multiculturalism (all the others)".

His vision of Europe was pessimistic: "Europe is sinking, it is a disaster, there is nothing to do." Europe will soon be the Third World", in relation to the emergence of new geopolitical blocks: "In Universal History there are telluric currents that when their time comes they make their way at dizzying speed and there is no one to stop them. There was a millennium that was that of the Mediterranean: the millennium of the Nativity, of Hellas, of Egypt... Then another millennium that was of the Atlantic, that of the United States, England, the colonial empires... and now comes the millennium of the Pacific. There are three large emerging blocs in the world: one is Russia, another is China and Southeast Asia, and the other is Muslim countries. The latter are disjointed from each other, but the moment they come together, Europe is going to become a theme park, a museum."

Sanchez Dragó in 1979

The writer understands that we are in the stage of the Hindu Kali Yuga, a "flabby totalitarianism" in which there is only emptiness: that of the Happy Man in the manner of Aldous Huxley, ugliness elevated to the category of art, the suppression of the criteria of excellence and the corruption of language, the demagogy and rebellion of the rabble, that of the standard of egalitarianism, that of castrating leveling against the ontological differentiation of the two sexes, that of the transformation of freedom of thought into its inanity, that of materialistic and reductionist scientism, that of the substitution of the real for the virtual, that of the tweeters who believe they are Shakespeare and act like Savonarola, that of globalization that prostrates itself before the altars of holy consumption, that of mercantilism at all costs, that of political correctness as the new Inquisition. He has affirmed that Rousseau is the father of totalitarianism.

It vindicates the destiny of peoples, its roots in history, the collective unconscious, the need for the sacred, the pedagogy of myths, the vindication of excellence and the existence of races. He also states that the reductio ad Hitlerum is an instrument of the current single thought to silence the heterodox. He has claimed to be one of the few Spanish writers and journalists, along with Juan Manuel de Prada, to support Brexit and Donald Trump's presidential candidacy.

She also attacked feminism, in her opinion promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and other plutocratic institutions and the CIA with the objective of "doubling the tax revenues that irrigate the System's coronaries" incorporating women into work and with the progressive destruction of the family, a natural environment in which moral values are transmitted and personality is forged: both parents absent from home, it is necessary to take children to school concentration camps from their very early years to lobotomize, robotize, sheep and transform them into submissive citizens who pass with their heads down through the ballot box and the tax office.

He himself defined himself as "a man without labels". However, from his youthful anti-Franco leftism to his liberal condition -in the broad sense of the word- in recent times, he has traveled a path that it has led him to reach spiritual orientalism. His attitude towards the life that he has acquired over the years could be summed up in the following words:

"I care about social evolution. I am only interested in the spiritual, what is within us. Take care of other people outside. I think the world is in constant decline since the sixth century before Christ. And, in any case, he definitely touched the bottom in 1789. I am not multiculturalist, but cosmopolitan, which is the opposite. Multiculturalist relativism is a cultural genocide against all cultures, because it dissolves them in a sulfuric acid gazpacho. I'm not interested in things changing, but deepening in them. It was the first teaching that 40 years ago I was transferred from India. Man never changes, but it can be wider, deeper, higher, more intense and more extensive. That's my idea. "

"Multiculturalism means the cancellation of all values in the attempt to find new ones. If they come to tell us that the 'tam tam' of an African tribe is worth the same as the Ninth Symphony Beethoven, that's not a new value, it's a devaluation.

His critique of the Western world is radical: in the 18th century the inhabitants of the West were deprived of ethical guidelines and aesthetics that only myths provide (essential guidelines for a balanced development of human beings), when the sacred worldview of life, with Christian roots, was replaced by the rationalist conception "from which atheism, cartesianism, scientism, mechanism, materialism and brutal economism prevailing in most of the world".

Regarding literature, he subscribed to the opinion of César González Ruano that in literature “everything that is not autobiography is plagiarism" and for this reason he declares that the only literature that interests him is egographic. He stated that "the only revolutionary duty a writer has is to create beauty", the task of the writer is to put the macrocosm in communication with microcosm, trying to explain from below what is above and that language is the true homeland of a writer.

He thought, like Carl Gustav Jung, that "life not lived is a disease from which one can die", like María Zambrano that "there are things that cannot be said (...) but what has to be written is what cannot be said" and he agreed with Ecclesiastes that the end of a thing is better than its beginning.

Throughout his life, he has won various literary awards (See below all his awards). It is worth mentioning the National Prize for Literature in its essay modality in 1979 that he obtained for his work Gárgoris y Habidis. A magical history of Spain , in which he studies the enigma of Spain.

He defended bullfighting, he feels that it is what remains of the character of Spain, which permeates the way of speaking, writing, thinking and even existing in Spain, which is an essential part of his life and among the Bellas Arts is "the highest ranking" because the others (painting, sculpture, literature, music, dance and architecture) revolve around it. He thinks that the bullfighter teaches us to live when he kills the bull and also how to die when he dies in the ring or in the operating room, and that he fulfills the function of the hero of the ancient world, that is, offering public exemplarity to the society. Add to the three classic commandments of bullfighting on foot, "stop, temper and command", those of "link and carry luck". He understands bullfighting as a sacrament and believes that his fans are the castaways of the Age of gold.

A new species of beetle discovered in Namibia has been named Somaticus sanchezdragoi after him, something he considers "the highest honor than life" has given him.

Despite their ideological differences, he was a friend of Jorge Verstrynge and a friend of José Saramago.

In 2021, he collaborated on the book promoted by Vox against the Historical Memory Law entitled "Historical Memory", a threat to peace in Europe, edited by the Group of European Conservatives and Reformists of the European Parliament, in which Vox is part, and in which prominent members of this party such as Hermann Tertsch and Francisco José Contreras have also participated, as well as the historian Stanley G. Payne

For Sánchez Dragó, political correctness constitutes a new form of puritanism. He also maintains that Opus Dei is an organization that believes in the idea of Progress and that feminism has ensured that there are no more Ariadnas. He has also criticized that society lives in a perpetual adolescence.He understands that we live in an ochlocracy and a "prudetocracy".

He affirmed that cats are their teachers because they do not understand submission, they are both alert and restful and watch over children's sleep. He believes that they are psychopomp animals, that is, they can roam when they want they desire the passages that communicate with the Beyond and have the faculty, the duty and the vocation to guide human beings and perhaps other animals, in their disincarnations. He suspects that writers may be the favorite animals of cats, since they like to sit next to the pages, the computer or the typewriter (formerly) and watch the writer's fingers pull out words from the depths of his mind. He wrote the story Soseki. Immortal and tiger , dedicated to his cat Soseki, who died in a domestic accident. After examining the circumstances in which the accident occurred, Sánchez Dragó came to the conclusion that, in order to save the life of her granddaughter, Soseki decided to sacrifice his own.

Characteristics of his work

Style

He was looking for complex expressions, he conceived literary language as something not completely removed from usual language but rather complementary, this results in the choice of an unusual, erudite lexicon, mixed with the popular, in the use of a large number of enumerations and adjectives, in the profusion of metaphors and in the use of compound sentences and syntactic structures with strong nesting. This style has been criticized for being excessively verbal and overloaded, empty of content, etc. Other critics have valued the great amount of resources and literary records of the writer, seeing this verbal excess as a kind of literary torrent.

Themes

He dealt with topics such as spirituality, the development of consciousness, wisdom, religions or literature on a recurring basis. Novels like El camino del corazón or Parallel Deaths have a strongly autobiographical theme. Other essays, such as Gárgoris and Habidis. A magical history of Spain or The path of the left hand: a code of conduct, reflect the thoughts of the author, one of whose fundamental features is the harmony with the philosophical universe of the East and the rejection of "Judeo-Christianity", of the modern Western world, and of Progress. Along the same lines, when in Gárgoris y Habidis he analyzes Spanish history, Dragó denies European Cartesian rationalism, Modernity and Christian faith, (although he understands the figure of Christ as the Jungian archetype of the hero whom he compares with Krishna, Osiris, Buddha, Mithras, Zoroaster and Bacchus and values the pagan legacy syncretized in Catholicism against Biblical literalism and Protestant iconoclastic), opposing mystical values originating from Gnosticism and an Antiquity that he deeply considered unknown: "The 6th century BC [ Axial Era ] is the century of Buddha, of Confucius, of Lao-tzu, of Zarathustra, of the Orphic movements, of Pythagoras, the pre-Socratics… That is the best moment of world history. Everything we know was said in that century and since then the world has been in continuous decline."

"In the East, on the contrary, they assure that time is circular, that everything is repeated, that history is eternal return of cycles that are chained and that the things of the world are not happening, but simply happen. It is the illud tempus, that of the erase once of the legends, the infantile fables and the sacred scriptures, that of the Golden Age, that of the apoline serenity and the dionisian ebriety, that of nothing matters anything of cynics, stoic and epicureans. In it there is neither the Fall nor, therefore, the deterioration and death. It is likely that the happy man had no shirt at the time of A thousand and a nightBut it's sure he doesn't have a watch now."

Despite his criticism of Christianity, he has praised the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ, which he considers inspired by Buddha, the Gospel of Saint John and the Apocalypse for considering them mystical and esoteric. He considers that the Holy Trinity has its origin in the Hindu Trimurti. In his work Gárgoris y Habidis we find praise for the fathers of the Church and doctors of the Church such as Saint Augustine, who he affirms was a "giant of erudition, a great philosopher, an exquisite intellectual, a teacher of generations, father of Catholicism with merits not inferior to those of Pablo" and Saint John Chrysostom in addition to others such as Saint Isidore of Seville, Saint Clement of Rome, Saint Basil of Caesarea, the most complete rhetorical stylist of the patristic Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the ascetic and theologian Origen of Alexandria, John Damascene, Blessed de Liébana, the scholastic Duns Scoto, the theologian, geographer, philosopher, chemist and precursor of the scholastic Alberto Magno, the blessed philosopher, poet, mystic, theologian and missionary Raimundo Lulio, Gonzalo de Berceo, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Fray Luis de León or the mystics Santa Teresa de Jesús and San Juan de la Cruz, Miguel de Molinos and Ana Catalina Emmerick. He has criticized the Second Vatican Council as progressive and the death of the liturgy, He has also praised the work of traditionalist authors such as Léon Bloy, G. K. Chesterton and Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

His vision of Christianity was as follows:

"Better, a thousand times better - being the two bad ones - the Counter-Reformation than the Reform. True Christianity is fruit at the time of the Mediterranean and a garment of Greek. It is its exuberance, its polychrome, its baroque, its cosmopolitanism, its mysticism,(...) its gift of ebriety, its sensuality, its music, its architecture, its images, its processions, its ceremonies, its philosophy, its intestinal struggles between the virtues and the capital sins, and - above all - the restful and unsuccessful gold. Sanchez Drago

Eleusinian meetings

Since 2013 he organized the Eleusinian Encounters, based on the Hermetic Circle founded by Hermann Hesse and Carl Gustav Jung in Montagnola (Switzerland). He dealt with topics such as spirituality, oriental philosophy, the tao, the eternal feminine, epicureanism, the orgasm, the hero, drunkenness, the Grail and the solar cults, the perennial philosophy, the journey or about himself. They have been held in places like Castilfrío de la Sierra, Salamanca, Kampot (Cambodia), Varanasi (India), Eleusis (Greece), Chefchaouen (Morocco), El Escorial or Café Gijón (Madrid). Javier Sierra, Ramiro Calle, José Miguel Gaona, Luis Alberto de Cuenca, José Javier Esparza, Jorge Verstrynge, Pablo d'Ors, Antonio Piñero, Carlos Blanco Pérez, María Elvira Roca Barea, Serafín Fanjul, Gustavo Bueno Sánchez, have participated. Valerie Tasso, Victoria Cirlot, Santiago Abascal, Alberto Vázquez Figueroa, Benigno Morilla, Juan Manuel de Prada, Anna Grau, Andrés Trapiello, Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, Joaquín Leguina, Juan Carlos Girauta, Toni Cantó, Juan Soto Ivars, Jorge Freire or Luis Eduardo Aute.

Work

Fernando Sánchez Dragó signed at the Madrid Book Fair (2007).

• Living Spain (Muchnik Editors, 1967)
• Gargoris and Luzis. A Magic History of Spain (Hyperion Books, 1978)
• Magical Spain: Epitome de Gárgoris y Givenis (Alianza Editorial, 1983)
• Eldorado (Editorial Planet, 1984)
• Finisterre. On trips, crossings, shipwrecks and navigations with Fernando Savater, Luis Racionero, Ramón Buenaventura, José María Álvarez, José María Poveda, Luis Paniagua, José María de Areilza, Pedro Martínez Montálvez, Marcos-Ricardo Barnatán, Xavier Domingo, Valentín Paz Andrade and Antonio Gala (Editorial Planeta, 1984)
• Ideas for a New Cultural Policy (Almar Editions, 1984)
• Fernando Sánchez Dragó. A magical life (with Joaquín Arnáiz) (Anjana Ediciones, 1985)
• Nile sources: protocols on the way to Damascus (Editorial Planet, 1986)
• From Priscilianism to Liberalism. Double jump without network (Editorial Prensa y Ediciones Iberoamericanas, 1987)
• I turned. Bulls and tauromagia (Espasa-Calpe, 1987)
• Gnosis or knowledge of the hidden (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1989)
• The Way of the Heart (Editorial Planet, 1990)
• Diary of a warrior. The Dragon, I (Editorial Planeta, 1992)
• The maze test (Editorial Planeta, 1992)
• Spiritual Calendar (Today, 1992)
• Numantine speech. Second and last departure from the ingenious Gonzalez and (Editorial Planet, 1995)
• The dawn would be. My encounters with the invisible (Editorial Planeta, 1996)
• Dictionary of Magic Spain (with Antonio Ruiz Vega) (Espasa-Calpe, 1997)
• Shiva wire. The Dragon, II (Editorial Planet, 1997)
• The road to Ithaca. The Dragon, III (Editorial Planet, 1998)
• Magical History of the Camino de Santiago (Editorial Planet, 1999)
• Letter from Jesus to the Pope (Editorial Planet, 2001)
• The path of the left hand (Martínez Roca, 2002)
• Happy sitting on the stern. The Dragon, IV (Editorial Planeta, 2004)
• Kokoro: A life or death. Drago interview (The Book Sphere, 2005)
• Parallel deaths (Editorial Planeta, 2006)
• Freedom, fraternity, inequality. Right. with Antonio Ruiz Vega (Editorial Áltera, 2007)
• Night diary. The most controversial texts of the most personal information (Editorial Planet, 2007)
• And if you speak ill of Spain... it's Spanish. (Editorial Planet, 2008)
• Soseki. Immortal and tiger (Editorial Planet, 2009)
• God raises them... and they talk about sex, drugs, Spain, corruption... with Albert Boadella (Editorial Planeta, 2010)
• The ferocious wolf (Editorial Altera, 2011)
• Those blue days. Memories of a weird child (Editorial Planet, 2011)
• Blood covenant with Ayanta Barilli (Editorial Planeta, 2013)
• The Song of Roldan: Crime and Punishment (Editorial Planet, 2015)
• Shangri-La: The Elixir of Eternal Youth (Editorial Planet, 2016)
• Santiago Abascal. Spain vertebrate (Editorial Planet, 2019)
• Spain guadaña. You'll burn like in '36. (with Juan Eslava Galán preface and Fernando Arrabal epilogue) (Editorial Almuzara, 2019)
• Galgo corridor. Warrior years. 1953-1964 (Editorial Planet, 2020)
• Talk to me. (Harkonnen Books, 2021)
• A walk through honor and death (Editorial Almuzara, 2022)

Awards

As a writer

• National Essay Award (Spain) Gargoris and Luzis. A Magical History of Spain (1979)
• Planet Award The maze test (1992)
• Martínez Roca Spirituality Award for The Left Hand Path (2002)
• Fernando Lara Prize for novel by Parallel deaths (2006)
• Premio Castilla y León de las Letras (2023)

As a journalist

As a journalist for the press, radio and television, he has worked in various countries. She was awarded the Ondas Award for El mundo por montera and the National Award for the Promotion of Reading for Black on White .

Television jobs

He has been a presenter and commentator on various cultural programs on television:

On Spanish Television:

• Meetings with the letters (1979 - 1980)
• National Library (1983)
• Night (1989)
• The world by mountain (1989 - 1990)
• Black on white (1997 - 2004)
• Books with uasabi (2015 - 2017)

On Channel 9:

• The Lighthouse of Alexandria (2002)

On Telemadrid:

• The White Nights (2004 - 2009)
• Diary of the night (2007 - 2008)
• Dragoland (2009)

In Four:

• Fourth Millennium (2007 - 2008)

On Telecinco:

• The Great Debate (2012 - 2013)
• Saturday Deluxe (2017)