IF YOU'RE in the Comunidad Valenciana any time between now and the early hours of March 20, you may notice an awful lot of noise and colour on the streets. It's the season for the region's biggest festival,...
Spain's only 'Book Village': Chapter and verse on a well-read road-trip
24/04/2022
INTERNATIONAL Book Day and Saint George's Day combined, with its huge street fair heaped with reading material and flowers across the whole of Catalunya, comes but once a year – so, if you missed the weekend's events, combining a Spanish road-trip with a page-turning experience might have to wait until next April.
Or so we thought, until we stumbled across what is referred to globally as 'Spain's most educated town' – the municipality with more book shops than school pupils.
The only place in the country allowed to call itself, officially, 'The Book Village', and taking its inspiration from the Hay Festival in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye – joint winner of the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, in the same year that the Arts prize went to Hollywood film soundtrack composers Ennio Morricone and John Williams – Urueña has recently been the subject of a travel report in The New York Times, meaning its reputation has now gone inter-continental.
And although this has not been confirmed, it might actually hold some sort of record for the most bookshops per inhabitant – one for every 17 residents.
Quite a feat for a village which doesn't even have a butcher's or a baker's, let alone a candlestick maker's.
Possibly, too, the bustling, busy Costas may be unable to hold a candle to Urueña's annual tourism figures, either. In an average year, its visitor numbers are approximately 100 for every single inhabitant.
In the heart of a 'booky province'
Completely walled in on all sides for the last 900 years, an island of red-roofed houses and Mediaeval monuments in a sea of barely-undulating green-and-gold farmland, this rural cluster on the high plains of Castilla y León in the northern end of central Spain is set in the province where the purest 'received Spanish' is reputedly spoken, and whose capital has its own literary acclaim.
Valladolid unveiled a plaque at number 12 of the Acera de Recoletos on March 12, 2013, the third anniversary of the death of post-war novelist Miguel Delibes at age 89, along with one of his most famous quotes: “I'm like a tree, which grows where it's planted.”
One of the much-acclaimed 'Generation of '36', along with poet Miguel Hernández, twenty-something novelist Carmen Laforet (of Nada fame) and experimental novel The Hive author Camilo José Cela, Delibes is best-known for his rambling monologue and intricately-psychological Five Hours With Mario, showcasing the clashes between the small-minded, small-town, closed and far-right sentiment versus the liberal, intellectual, secular anti-establishment left, or the 'conflict between the two Spains' during Franco's régime, via the imbalance in a husband-wife relationship.
Given how Franco's censorship meant nothing that spoke out against the fascist leadership or the Church would ever get into print and its authors would be guaranteeing themselves a slot in jail, Delibes managed to get around a sticky situation by killing off the character with the leftist views and having the polar opposite as the main narrator, talking at the deceased's coffin all night.
Not exactly a beach read, but essential for anyone wanting to get right into the heads of Spanish people on both sides of the political divide during the dictatorship, and a meaty case study for anyone with more than a passing interest in human psychology and social behaviour.
Delibes' final work, an historical novel that won him the National Narrative Prize, is especially lauded by the city of Valladolid due to its faithful and intricate depiction of life there in the early 16th century, at the time of the Lutherist reform – The Heretic follows the dangerously-thin line trodden by a Duke's son-turned-wealthy trader as he offers the Protestants from the north a gateway into Catholic Spain.
Incidentally, Valladolid, with its classical, stately architecture and its huge 'peacock park' (these colourful creatures roam loose in the Campo Grande gardens), and its homage to another inter-galactic literary legend in the shape of its Cervantes Museum, has recently been found to be, statistically, one of Europe's least-polluted and most-sunny cities.
Walk the walls of a village with more bookstores than school children
Just 51 kilometres from Valladolid city, or about 47 minutes along the A-60 motorway, the whole of the village of Urueña is an official national heritage site – which gives you a sizeable clue as to the impressive nature of its historical buildings.
That's almost every building, in fact, within the 'city' wall built between the 12th and 13th centuries and still standing – rather like that of York in northern England, you can walk along wide, stone pathways running the circumference of most of it, between turrets, looking down into backyards below.
Urueña's remoteness and diminutive size means it could have been in danger of going the same way as thousands of other villages in rural Spain – younger adults of childbearing age moving away to find work, whilst the retired inhabitants grew older and eventually died out, leading to mass population decline.
But although it is still only home to 191 people, according to the January 2021 census, Urueña's headcount grows ever so slightly each year – from 189 in 2020, and 188 in 2019 – slowly but surely, and largely due to the increasing job opportunities through its tourism and bookstore industries.
As recently as the early 21st century, residents in Urueña were not really reading fans; they made their living from farming, meaning they were largely too tired by the end of the long, arduous working day to bother with opening a book.
Then, in 2007, possibly off the back of its location in the heart of Miguel Delibes' stamping ground, Urueña made the radical decision to spend €3 million in provincial government funding on refurbishing its ruined buildings, constructing a conference centre, and renting said newly-restored properties for the token sum of €10 a month to traders, on the condition they ran them as book shops.
By that time, the butcher's and baker's had closed, since their owners had retired, but instead, the 191 villagers can feast on the contents of 11 bookstores.
Every single child at Urueña's school can have a book shop entirely to him- or herself, and there'll still be two left over for the adults; as at the start of spring term 2022, just nine kids were enrolled at the local primary.
Spain's answer to Hay-on-Wye with 100 tourists for every inhabitant
Mayor Francisco Rodríguez was born in Urueña and said there wasn't a single bookstore in his village when he was growing up, but that since 2007, the municipality has become a 'cultural Mecca'.
The founding of Spain's only 'Book Village' puts Urueña in the same category as Hay-on-Wye in Wales and Redu in Belgium, among others, Rodríguez explains.
“This huge change might seem a little odd, but we're proud of what Urueña has become,” he admits.
“It makes us different and special compared with our neighbouring villages.”
More than just a source of pride, though, being a 'Book Village' has proven lucrative: A typical 19,000 visitors, day-trippers and holidaymakers, pop into Urueña annually.
At least, that was the number in 2021, during much of the first half of which nobody was travelling outside their own or, at most, their next town, due to ongoing local lockdowns and spiralling Covid rates.
So in a 'normal' year, it is likely to be much higher; maybe even double.
As well as its proliferation of book shops, which are enough of a hook in themselves, Urueña runs major literature conferences, hosts theatre productions, and offers calligraphy courses and day or weekend workshops, advertised nationally and internationally.
The municipality receives €70,000 a year from government funds to organise these events, but more than pays it back through taxes on tourism income earned as a result, making this public grant an investment rather than an expense.
Literary treasure troves (including English editions)
Being able to read in Spanish – although it opens an entire world or, at least, 17 regions' worth of bookshops and libraries – is not essential for enjoying the fruits of Urueña and its labours. If you live in Spain or are a regular visitor, you'll be able to recognise the names of foodstuffs used as cooking ingredients, so recipe books will be accessible to you; travel books include abundant pictures and dates, providing inspiration and helpful trip-planning ideas, even if you need a dictionary to get at the detail; these, and a huge range of fascinating history books, are on sale at Alcaraván, an emporium of cultural reference.
Cinema buffs and music-lovers will find tonnes of reference material at Grifilm bookstore – again, the pictures are often as interesting as the text, or even more – and Grifilm also sells books of all types, including novels, in the English language.
If you have young children or grandchildren, start them off early learning the Spanish language – if they're at school here, they'll be doing so anyway – and the Boutique del Cuento ('Story Boutique') specialises in books for small humans.
Art books are another type you can almost just buy for the pictures, without worrying about being able to read the text, and instruction books on drawing, painting and calligraphy-writing are very visual in any case; you can find these at Acuino Caligrafía & Arte, which also operates as a studio for courses.
The Librería Enoteca, run by the provincial government or Diputación de Valladolid, specialises in books about wine, and Libros K focuses mainly on collectors' books and books for collectors, and antique comics, including those published in recent living memory but harder to get hold of.
As for the remaining six – these are all 'mainstream' book shops, selling novels, classics and bestsellers, beach reads, cult reads, non-fiction, autobiographies, reference guides, and so on.
They may or may not have international sections in different languages (if you're planning a visit, you could start one yourself by donating your old, already-read books for them to sell) – or, given that all bookstores in Spain can order in copies of anything in print, you can arrange for them to source the ones you've been meaning to read in your own language ahead of your trip, then collect them and keep the receipt as a souvenir of your visit to 'The Book Village'.
Perhaps drop them all a line first, to see whether they have ranges in languages other than Spanish, and how large, to find out whether you can still go browsing all day even if you can still only read comfortably in your mother tongue.
'Mainstream' book shops in Urueña are Primera Página ('First Page'), Páramo (second picture), El Rincón del Ábrego ('Ábrego's Corner'), El Rincón Escrito ('The Written Corner'), and El Parnasillo.
Music-lovers' paradise and Mediaeval monuments...with bells on
The new conference centre doubles up as a museum and cultural hub, named after the province's own celebrity author; the Centro e-LEA Miguel Delibes is definitely worth a visit.
As well as being a 'Book Village', Urueña is a celebration of arts and culture as a whole – musicians, from professionals to amateur hobby-players, will be in their element at the Luis Delgado Museum, with over 500 instruments on display.
More musical instruments, engravings and church-clangers can be viewed at the Joaquín Díaz Bell Museum.
And for 'living' history, don't miss a tour of Urueña's chozos, or mudhuts.
These were rebuilt from scratch a couple of years ago – adobe, or mud-and-straw-brick domes, constructed by hand using only the original, ancient methods, recreating the toolsheds and rest-huts where farmers took their lunch and drink breaks for centuries when the village lived off the land.
Urueña's 11th-century castle is completely intact – it sits on a slight incline above the village, with a huge, man-made pond in its grounds, and has suffered very little wear and tear since King Fernando I The Great commissioned its construction around 1,000 years ago.
This fortress served as a residence for Mediaeval rulers and aristocracy, as well as acting as protection – along with the boundary wall, of which 80% is still upright – given that the village was particularly sought-after by the Kingdoms of Castilla and of León, then separate territories, due to its privileged geographical location, and both were prepared to fight for it.
Two churches, Romanesque-style Nuestra Señora de la Anunciada, around 1,000 years old, and the Nuestra Señora del Azogue, are frequently toured by visitors to Urueña – the latter, an architectural 'bridge' between the Mediaeval Gothic and the later Renaissance styles, built in the 16th century, is well-loved thanks to its arched gateway, the Puerta del Azogue, through which you can get a picture-postcard photo of the village centre (like the first one, above).
And then there's the ancient heraldry – coats of arms carved into buildings, the stamp of the wealthy and powerful, left behind over the last 10 centuries.
So, plenty of reasons within these walls why you should 'book' a trip.
(Sorry. We'll show ourselves out, shall we...?)
If you're in the Valladolid area
Making the lengthy journey from Spain's coasts or major cities to the province of Valladolid means another 100 or 150 kilometres, or 60 to 90 minutes' extra motorway travel, is neither here nor there – so you may as well make a week of it and visit some of Spain's most globally-acclaimed parts while you're at it.
As well as Valladolid city at 51 kilometres from Urueña, continuing along the main road for another hour will take you to Segovia, capital of the neighbouring province of the same name, where the massive Roman aqueduct – too long to be able to see both ends from the middle – is one of the country's most famous heritage monuments.
About 90 kilometres, or 80 minutes, south of Valladolid on the motorway is the picturesque Mediaeval walled city of Ávila, another provincial capital and a Mecca for day-trippers from Madrid seeking history and culture.
Less than 120 kilometres from Urueña or about 100 kilometres south-west of Valladolid is the classical city of Salamanca, a beautiful sandstone-coloured capital and home of the nation's first-ever university, meaning it often gets known internationally as 'the Oxford of Spain'.
Heading out of Urueña in the opposite direction – north-west – an hour and 20 minutes along the A-6 and A-66 motorways brings you to the city of León, whose cathedral is widely considered to be among the most beautiful in Spain; or, a slightly longer journey, north-east, just under two hours or 174 kilometres from Urueña (around an hour or just under 120 kilometres from Valladolid city), the jewel in Spain's ecclesiastical crown is waiting in the city of Burgos to spoil every single future cathedral visit you'll ever make on any continent.
Burgos' majestic, Gothic, off-white cathedral, the country's second-largest after that of Sevilla, will quite literally blow your mind, and go on to prove itself a near-impossible act to follow wherever else you go in the world – practically every other one on planet earth will disappoint you in comparison. Basically, travellers never quite recover from Burgos cathedral, however far they fly in an attempt to forget they ever saw it.
Related Topics
You may also be interested in ...
INTERNATIONAL Book Day and Saint George's Day combined, with its huge street fair heaped with reading material and flowers across the whole of Catalunya, comes but once a year – so, if you missed the weekend's events, combining a Spanish road-trip with a page-turning experience might have to wait until next April.
Or so we thought, until we stumbled across what is referred to globally as 'Spain's most educated town' – the municipality with more book shops than school pupils.
The only place in the country allowed to call itself, officially, 'The Book Village', and taking its inspiration from the Hay Festival in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye – joint winner of the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, in the same year that the Arts prize went to Hollywood film soundtrack composers Ennio Morricone and John Williams – Urueña has recently been the subject of a travel report in The New York Times, meaning its reputation has now gone inter-continental.
And although this has not been confirmed, it might actually hold some sort of record for the most bookshops per inhabitant – one for every 17 residents.
Quite a feat for a village which doesn't even have a butcher's or a baker's, let alone a candlestick maker's.
Possibly, too, the bustling, busy Costas may be unable to hold a candle to Urueña's annual tourism figures, either. In an average year, its visitor numbers are approximately 100 for every single inhabitant.
In the heart of a 'booky province'
Completely walled in on all sides for the last 900 years, an island of red-roofed houses and Mediaeval monuments in a sea of barely-undulating green-and-gold farmland, this rural cluster on the high plains of Castilla y León in the northern end of central Spain is set in the province where the purest 'received Spanish' is reputedly spoken, and whose capital has its own literary acclaim.
Valladolid unveiled a plaque at number 12 of the Acera de Recoletos on March 12, 2013, the third anniversary of the death of post-war novelist Miguel Delibes at age 89, along with one of his most famous quotes: “I'm like a tree, which grows where it's planted.”
One of the much-acclaimed 'Generation of '36', along with poet Miguel Hernández, twenty-something novelist Carmen Laforet (of Nada fame) and experimental novel The Hive author Camilo José Cela, Delibes is best-known for his rambling monologue and intricately-psychological Five Hours With Mario, showcasing the clashes between the small-minded, small-town, closed and far-right sentiment versus the liberal, intellectual, secular anti-establishment left, or the 'conflict between the two Spains' during Franco's régime, via the imbalance in a husband-wife relationship.
Given how Franco's censorship meant nothing that spoke out against the fascist leadership or the Church would ever get into print and its authors would be guaranteeing themselves a slot in jail, Delibes managed to get around a sticky situation by killing off the character with the leftist views and having the polar opposite as the main narrator, talking at the deceased's coffin all night.
Not exactly a beach read, but essential for anyone wanting to get right into the heads of Spanish people on both sides of the political divide during the dictatorship, and a meaty case study for anyone with more than a passing interest in human psychology and social behaviour.
Delibes' final work, an historical novel that won him the National Narrative Prize, is especially lauded by the city of Valladolid due to its faithful and intricate depiction of life there in the early 16th century, at the time of the Lutherist reform – The Heretic follows the dangerously-thin line trodden by a Duke's son-turned-wealthy trader as he offers the Protestants from the north a gateway into Catholic Spain.
Incidentally, Valladolid, with its classical, stately architecture and its huge 'peacock park' (these colourful creatures roam loose in the Campo Grande gardens), and its homage to another inter-galactic literary legend in the shape of its Cervantes Museum, has recently been found to be, statistically, one of Europe's least-polluted and most-sunny cities.
Walk the walls of a village with more bookstores than school children
Just 51 kilometres from Valladolid city, or about 47 minutes along the A-60 motorway, the whole of the village of Urueña is an official national heritage site – which gives you a sizeable clue as to the impressive nature of its historical buildings.
That's almost every building, in fact, within the 'city' wall built between the 12th and 13th centuries and still standing – rather like that of York in northern England, you can walk along wide, stone pathways running the circumference of most of it, between turrets, looking down into backyards below.
Urueña's remoteness and diminutive size means it could have been in danger of going the same way as thousands of other villages in rural Spain – younger adults of childbearing age moving away to find work, whilst the retired inhabitants grew older and eventually died out, leading to mass population decline.
But although it is still only home to 191 people, according to the January 2021 census, Urueña's headcount grows ever so slightly each year – from 189 in 2020, and 188 in 2019 – slowly but surely, and largely due to the increasing job opportunities through its tourism and bookstore industries.
As recently as the early 21st century, residents in Urueña were not really reading fans; they made their living from farming, meaning they were largely too tired by the end of the long, arduous working day to bother with opening a book.
Then, in 2007, possibly off the back of its location in the heart of Miguel Delibes' stamping ground, Urueña made the radical decision to spend €3 million in provincial government funding on refurbishing its ruined buildings, constructing a conference centre, and renting said newly-restored properties for the token sum of €10 a month to traders, on the condition they ran them as book shops.
By that time, the butcher's and baker's had closed, since their owners had retired, but instead, the 191 villagers can feast on the contents of 11 bookstores.
Every single child at Urueña's school can have a book shop entirely to him- or herself, and there'll still be two left over for the adults; as at the start of spring term 2022, just nine kids were enrolled at the local primary.
Spain's answer to Hay-on-Wye with 100 tourists for every inhabitant
Mayor Francisco Rodríguez was born in Urueña and said there wasn't a single bookstore in his village when he was growing up, but that since 2007, the municipality has become a 'cultural Mecca'.
The founding of Spain's only 'Book Village' puts Urueña in the same category as Hay-on-Wye in Wales and Redu in Belgium, among others, Rodríguez explains.
“This huge change might seem a little odd, but we're proud of what Urueña has become,” he admits.
“It makes us different and special compared with our neighbouring villages.”
More than just a source of pride, though, being a 'Book Village' has proven lucrative: A typical 19,000 visitors, day-trippers and holidaymakers, pop into Urueña annually.
At least, that was the number in 2021, during much of the first half of which nobody was travelling outside their own or, at most, their next town, due to ongoing local lockdowns and spiralling Covid rates.
So in a 'normal' year, it is likely to be much higher; maybe even double.
As well as its proliferation of book shops, which are enough of a hook in themselves, Urueña runs major literature conferences, hosts theatre productions, and offers calligraphy courses and day or weekend workshops, advertised nationally and internationally.
The municipality receives €70,000 a year from government funds to organise these events, but more than pays it back through taxes on tourism income earned as a result, making this public grant an investment rather than an expense.
Literary treasure troves (including English editions)
Being able to read in Spanish – although it opens an entire world or, at least, 17 regions' worth of bookshops and libraries – is not essential for enjoying the fruits of Urueña and its labours. If you live in Spain or are a regular visitor, you'll be able to recognise the names of foodstuffs used as cooking ingredients, so recipe books will be accessible to you; travel books include abundant pictures and dates, providing inspiration and helpful trip-planning ideas, even if you need a dictionary to get at the detail; these, and a huge range of fascinating history books, are on sale at Alcaraván, an emporium of cultural reference.
Cinema buffs and music-lovers will find tonnes of reference material at Grifilm bookstore – again, the pictures are often as interesting as the text, or even more – and Grifilm also sells books of all types, including novels, in the English language.
If you have young children or grandchildren, start them off early learning the Spanish language – if they're at school here, they'll be doing so anyway – and the Boutique del Cuento ('Story Boutique') specialises in books for small humans.
Art books are another type you can almost just buy for the pictures, without worrying about being able to read the text, and instruction books on drawing, painting and calligraphy-writing are very visual in any case; you can find these at Acuino Caligrafía & Arte, which also operates as a studio for courses.
The Librería Enoteca, run by the provincial government or Diputación de Valladolid, specialises in books about wine, and Libros K focuses mainly on collectors' books and books for collectors, and antique comics, including those published in recent living memory but harder to get hold of.
As for the remaining six – these are all 'mainstream' book shops, selling novels, classics and bestsellers, beach reads, cult reads, non-fiction, autobiographies, reference guides, and so on.
They may or may not have international sections in different languages (if you're planning a visit, you could start one yourself by donating your old, already-read books for them to sell) – or, given that all bookstores in Spain can order in copies of anything in print, you can arrange for them to source the ones you've been meaning to read in your own language ahead of your trip, then collect them and keep the receipt as a souvenir of your visit to 'The Book Village'.
Perhaps drop them all a line first, to see whether they have ranges in languages other than Spanish, and how large, to find out whether you can still go browsing all day even if you can still only read comfortably in your mother tongue.
'Mainstream' book shops in Urueña are Primera Página ('First Page'), Páramo (second picture), El Rincón del Ábrego ('Ábrego's Corner'), El Rincón Escrito ('The Written Corner'), and El Parnasillo.
Music-lovers' paradise and Mediaeval monuments...with bells on
The new conference centre doubles up as a museum and cultural hub, named after the province's own celebrity author; the Centro e-LEA Miguel Delibes is definitely worth a visit.
As well as being a 'Book Village', Urueña is a celebration of arts and culture as a whole – musicians, from professionals to amateur hobby-players, will be in their element at the Luis Delgado Museum, with over 500 instruments on display.
More musical instruments, engravings and church-clangers can be viewed at the Joaquín Díaz Bell Museum.
And for 'living' history, don't miss a tour of Urueña's chozos, or mudhuts.
These were rebuilt from scratch a couple of years ago – adobe, or mud-and-straw-brick domes, constructed by hand using only the original, ancient methods, recreating the toolsheds and rest-huts where farmers took their lunch and drink breaks for centuries when the village lived off the land.
Urueña's 11th-century castle is completely intact – it sits on a slight incline above the village, with a huge, man-made pond in its grounds, and has suffered very little wear and tear since King Fernando I The Great commissioned its construction around 1,000 years ago.
This fortress served as a residence for Mediaeval rulers and aristocracy, as well as acting as protection – along with the boundary wall, of which 80% is still upright – given that the village was particularly sought-after by the Kingdoms of Castilla and of León, then separate territories, due to its privileged geographical location, and both were prepared to fight for it.
Two churches, Romanesque-style Nuestra Señora de la Anunciada, around 1,000 years old, and the Nuestra Señora del Azogue, are frequently toured by visitors to Urueña – the latter, an architectural 'bridge' between the Mediaeval Gothic and the later Renaissance styles, built in the 16th century, is well-loved thanks to its arched gateway, the Puerta del Azogue, through which you can get a picture-postcard photo of the village centre (like the first one, above).
And then there's the ancient heraldry – coats of arms carved into buildings, the stamp of the wealthy and powerful, left behind over the last 10 centuries.
So, plenty of reasons within these walls why you should 'book' a trip.
(Sorry. We'll show ourselves out, shall we...?)
If you're in the Valladolid area
Making the lengthy journey from Spain's coasts or major cities to the province of Valladolid means another 100 or 150 kilometres, or 60 to 90 minutes' extra motorway travel, is neither here nor there – so you may as well make a week of it and visit some of Spain's most globally-acclaimed parts while you're at it.
As well as Valladolid city at 51 kilometres from Urueña, continuing along the main road for another hour will take you to Segovia, capital of the neighbouring province of the same name, where the massive Roman aqueduct – too long to be able to see both ends from the middle – is one of the country's most famous heritage monuments.
About 90 kilometres, or 80 minutes, south of Valladolid on the motorway is the picturesque Mediaeval walled city of Ávila, another provincial capital and a Mecca for day-trippers from Madrid seeking history and culture.
Less than 120 kilometres from Urueña or about 100 kilometres south-west of Valladolid is the classical city of Salamanca, a beautiful sandstone-coloured capital and home of the nation's first-ever university, meaning it often gets known internationally as 'the Oxford of Spain'.
Heading out of Urueña in the opposite direction – north-west – an hour and 20 minutes along the A-6 and A-66 motorways brings you to the city of León, whose cathedral is widely considered to be among the most beautiful in Spain; or, a slightly longer journey, north-east, just under two hours or 174 kilometres from Urueña (around an hour or just under 120 kilometres from Valladolid city), the jewel in Spain's ecclesiastical crown is waiting in the city of Burgos to spoil every single future cathedral visit you'll ever make on any continent.
Burgos' majestic, Gothic, off-white cathedral, the country's second-largest after that of Sevilla, will quite literally blow your mind, and go on to prove itself a near-impossible act to follow wherever else you go in the world – practically every other one on planet earth will disappoint you in comparison. Basically, travellers never quite recover from Burgos cathedral, however far they fly in an attempt to forget they ever saw it.
Related Topics
You may also be interested in ...
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