We continue today with my small contribution to the history of the newspaper El País, which we started last week. And we were when the editor José Ortega Spottorno and I met by chance at the Barajas airport (today President Adolfo Suárez), getting on the same plane:
Man, Ramón, it’s great that you’re going to Valencia. Do you have dinner free? – Ortega asked me.
For you, always – I answered.
I carried out my Valencian activities with some haste, and already in the evening, I was able to join the interesting meeting of support in Valencia for the birth of a newspaper with a desire for freedom and modern in its vision of everything: El País.
Ortega, his team, and I had dinner with a good group of businessmen, and the project was explained to them, which I had already quickly assumed based on what Ortega told me. The underlying discussion among the diners was about whether the bourgeoisie in Spain should join the bandwagon of democracy, among other means through the press… and with that desire, we raised ten million pesetas for the future El País.
Good experience, so good that Ortega proposed that we do another financing advance together, which was held in Santiago de Compostela, where my colleague José B. Terceiro and I raised eight million more from Galician businessmen.
Because of these activities and others, Ortega proposed that I be one of the members of the Board of Directors of the publisher of the new newspaper (PRISA). And fortunately among the advisors of those early times, very worthy people arrived: Jesús Aguirre, now Duke of Alba, the lawyer Matías Cortés, the editor Jesús Polanco; and his friends Ricardo Díez Hochleitner and Pancho González.
We all felt something special in those times, with the feeling that we were doing something important: moving towards democracy, working for a truly free press.