Studying in Landete: grants, a residence and three hundred students

A village without a secondary school

In the late 1950s, a boy or girl from a village in the Serranía Baja (lower Serranía) who wanted to study for the bachillerato, the secondary school qualification, had to move to Cuenca, Teruel or Valencia, and few families could afford it. In Landete, the council secretary, Claudio Novella Sánchez, who later became mayor, was determined that they should be able to study there. He spoke to the vet, the cooperative, the town council and the institutions of the time, and the village gained a colegio libre, a school whose pupils took external examinations: classes were taught in Landete and teachers from the Instituto Alfonso VIII in Cuenca came to hold examinations at the end of the school year.

Where to sleep

Accommodation was the problem. The first students from elsewhere lived in private houses, in a manor house and in the youth centre. Then the residence was built, with money and unpaid days of work contributed by villagers: the Colegio Menor Andrés de Cabrera, which the Ministry approved in 1964 when it was already operating, with 84 places, later increased to a hundred. There was another residence, La Verde, beside the river, and even then applications had to be turned down for lack of space. Between residents, students lodging in houses and children who came daily from nearby villages, on foot or by bicycle, Landete came to have more than three hundred young people studying.

Grants and letters

Novella wrote to town councils in the province and elsewhere to offer places with grants covering tuition and residence; families paid for the journey. They came from Cádiz, Navarra, Segovia, Teruel, Soria, La Roda or Murcia, and some from much further away. For some students from Navarra the journey was through Zaragoza, Teruel and Cañete, and from there to Landete. According to former students’ accounts, Novella called families to congratulate them on good marks and also to warn them when something was going wrong.

What remained

Besides the bachillerato, trades such as electrical work were learnt in the village workshops in the afternoons, and there were sports and activities. Teachers, technicians, doctors, vets and lawyers came out of it. The village felt it too: shops, bakeries, butchers and the houses that took in students lived partly from them. Former students published a magazine and, from what they have told the chronicler of Moya, remember those years well.