The narrator of Los montes viejos returns to the family home in Soria after the death of his father. There he must take charge of a land that, far from the idealization of other times, now requires the care of the trees, the clearing of undergrowth, and preparations to fight the fire. During his successive stays in this territory of imprecise boundaries, between the countryside and the small provincial town, he will decipher "a rhythm that is only in time with itself," that of a nature that knows itself "far from the war of arguments."

But it will also reveal a silent and insidious conscience of History: that of those forgotten men and women (countrymen and foreigners, fugitives, men of their word, people of trade attached to the land, young storytellers, visionaries of the past, dreamers of the revolution...) through whom a republic and a civil war passed, the migrations of survival..., and life, in short, in its most tenuous and revealing aspects.

With its beautiful prose, impregnated with the liveliness of popular speech, and a singular cadence of thought, between the novel and the most intuitive essay, Los montes viejos is an ambitious investigation against any naive naturalism or sweetened nostalgia. Against the myth of an Edenic country, but also against forgetfulness. A kind of modern Virgilian georgic crossed by the contingency that compares on the scale, with the same suspicion, nature and history.