We met Javier Sierra at Librería General in Zaragoza on a hot August afternoon. Sierra, journalist and writer from Teruel awarded with the Planeta Prize in 2017 for El fuego invisible, has just turned 50 years old; one more turn in the sun that he celebrated last August 11 with a cosmic experience: under the starry sky of the Galactica center of Arcos de las Salinas, in the Sierra de Gúdar-Javalambre.
His life and professional career has a lot to do with cosmology, occultism and UFOs. When he was just a boy of eight years old he became interested in this phenomenon and wrote letters to the president of Spain, to NASA and to the Vatican so that someone would give an answer to his questions about flying saucers. His letters were answered.
We also chatted with him about his childhood, his family, his life in Teruel, his interest in reading and writing, his first stories and his passion for myths, paranormal phenomena and the occult. All this at a time marked by the coronavirus pandemic, a context in which Javier Sierra has published his latest novel, El Mensaje de Pandora, a reflection on a possible extraterrestrial origin of the covid that he wrote while confined to his home in Madrid.
Writing has served him on many occasions to try to answer questions or decipher the etymological origin of many myths. He tells us about the evocative power that these terms have had in writing his stories. The Grail, for example, which he spins in The Invisible Fire, is one of them.
Precisely in this story is one in which the “magical Aragon” appears more represented. What is the relationship between the dragon and the dinosaur fossils of Teruel? Does the grail have an Aragonese origin? In the conversation we delve into some symbols and myths of what Sierra calls “a territory of imagination”. Writing about Aragon is a way of returning to his origins, which he will surely repeat in the future because he already announces that what he will write next has to do with “Aragonese history or prehistory”.
We address the lack of knowledge that exists of the northern Camino de Santiago, the Aragonese, “a road that has been ignored and ignored”. A route that traditionally began in Somport, in Huesca, something that Javier Sierra has vindicated in his Movistar+ series Otros Mundos. We travel with him along the symbols of the Camino de Santiago, passing through Jaca, the first cathedral to be built on the Iberian Peninsula. His conclusion is clear: “the Aragonese have been ignored in the last century, and this reaches issues such as the Camino de Santiago”.
