Spanish “People from Murcia are idiots.”
That's what people said to me, laughing, every single time I told them where I was going to study. They don't even speak Castilian down there. They live in the orchard. They sunbathe, they eat oranges, there's nothing.
I was going for a master's in innovation and tourism marketing, which I want on the record as the least likely credential in this entire story.
They had painted Murcia for me as a calabaza — a pumpkin — and honestly I was scared to arrive. The train did not help. October, window seat, and outside the glass was sand and mountains and desert, a world that looked more like Star Wars than Earth. I got there under a cloud of dust, into a heat that could kill you, and said out loud: what have I done.
Then I walked into the most creative room I have ever stood in. A studio called , where innovation wasn't a quarterly initiative, it was a Tuesday. Greeks, Filipinos, Canadians, Belgians, one American, and a guy from Cehegín, around a table buried in Playmobil. Lateral thinking as the house language.
I came for the language. I stayed because I had never stood anywhere more inventive.
So I stopped defending the place and joined it. Wrote a column in murciano under the byline Juanico Saye, Americanico. Went looking for the orchard everybody warned me about and never found it — oranges everywhere, sure, that part is true. What I found was a culture of making things.
Do like the murcianos do and you'll keep finding innovation. Acho.
The place everybody laughs at is the place nobody is competing for.
Murcia gave the world the submarine and the man who worked out the helicopter. I went there for the language and accidentally picked up the career.