“In Gipuzkoa there are no anti-atomic shelters”, headlined El Diario Vasco in 1981. It offered a tip: build them in basements. And a price: two million pesetas (the equivalent, with inflation, to about 50,000 euros today: tourism had not yet driven up bunker prices). Given the state of the world today, with the FIFA Peace Prize winner bombing countries as if spitting olive pits while trying to drag others into a planetary war, we renew the advice for our readers: know that in the Omecillo River valley, between Álava and Burgos, hermits from a thousand years ago excavated caves, inside which they carved arches, niches, altars and tombs in the rock, and there they took refuge from the perils of the world. Those hermits must have had apocalyptic visions, because they opened their lairs ten kilometers from the place where the Garoña nuclear plant would rise. And they hollowed them out in limestone: fine armor against nuclear radiation.
In the novel Cántico por Leibowitz, monks resist the atomic war that has destroyed civilization and try to reconstruct lost knowledge, in a new Middle Ages. Bands of survivors have killed the authorities and the scholars who triggered the deluge of fire, and proclaim: “Let us teach our children that the world is new. Let us perform a great Simplification and then the world will begin again.” I fear that in 2027 it could serve as a political slogan.