Last night the poet, teacher and priest Jacinto Herrero Esteban received the title of adoptive son of the capital of Avila before numerous former students and people related to the world of Avila culture, such as the José Jiménez Lozano Cervantes Prize, a native of the same town as the honoree .
‘It means that I have done something for the city ‘, shortly before starting the act in which he received an award in the city that has hosted him since 1965, where he has served for decades as a professor of Literature at the Diocesan College.
He is the twenty-sixth adopted son of the capital of Avila.
Born in Langa in 1931, his best known work is ‘Ávila la Casa’, where he reflects his feelings towards the capital of Avila and paints the landscape in his verses.
His words were of “gratitude” to the municipal recognition, but also to the many former students who supported him.
Herrero received recognition for the ‘close connection of his poetic work with the city’, in a literary work with ‘a clear cultural and vital reference’, as approved in September by the plenary session of the Ávila City Council.
In that municipal decision, all those students were remembered who ‘have learned to love, not only the world of culture that the poet represents, but also a city with which the writer lives in permanent dialogue’.
On the occasion of the appointment of adopted son, ‘Escritos recovered’ was presented, a work published by the Ávila City Council that includes more than 200 prose pages of articles by the writer on various topics, from related to the capital or the province, to La Celestina , Thomas Merton, his countryman José Jiménez Lozano or even the comedian Gila.
For his part, the mayor of Ávila, Miguel Ángel García Nieto, praised Herrero on ‘a day like December 14, the feast of San Juan de la Cruz and the day of Hispanic letters’, and said that naming him an adopted son is’ to appropriate a little more of one of our own, of a writer of the highest prestige and long history ‘.
Jacinto Herrero, architect of the poetry collection ‘El toro de granito’, where they have published over the years -among others- the writer Carmen Conde or the Nicaraguan -country where he exercised the priesthood- Pablo Antonio Cuadra, has been creditor of the prizes -among others- Rocamador, Jaime Ferrán, Anthropos and Fray Luis de León.