“We need more conversation and fewer slogans. More listening and less noise. More time to understand each other, to recognize each other. More time to be better people”
2025 ends, and with it, an intense year for San Bartolomé. A year in which we have continued working to improve our municipality, to care for what we are, and to open paths toward what we want to become. But also twelve months in which I have felt, like many of you, that something is moving in public life in a way that does not help us move forward
In too many spaces, a forced search for ideological confrontation has taken hold, a kind of permanent competition to divide, to simplify reality into factions, to turn every conversation into a battlefield.
A confrontation that is not born from people's real problems, but from the need of some discourses to feed polarization as a strategy. And when that happens, we lose because when politics becomes noise, neighbors drift apart.
When public life is filled with empty gestures, 30-second marketing, messages designed to ignite rather than build, detachment is generated, which devalues those who do feel the calling of public service as an honest commitment, those who work with enthusiasm to improve the quality of life of their community, their city, their municipality.
In San Bartolomé, we have tried to maintain consistency between what we say, what we project, and what we do. It's not always easy. The tense atmosphere that pervades many areas—fueled by populist dynamics and the impact of fake news on truth—also reaches us. But precisely because of this, we must reaffirm ourselves in the opposite: in serenity, in listening, in responsibility, and in closeness.
And here I want to pause for a moment. Because sometimes culture, music, the honesty of those who create from a sincere place, remind us of what is essential. Like Robe, the recently deceased singer of Extremoduro, used to do. With his simple language, he was able to praise something that we need more than ever today: the value of time and the capacity to listen. His music taught us that stopping, looking at ourselves, and understanding each other is also a way of taking care of ourselves as a society.
We need more conversation and fewer slogans. More listening and less noise. More time to understand each other, to recognize each other. More time—as Robe would say—to be better people. And that, in politics, means more spaces for dialogue, more possible agreements, more willingness to look at the long term and less obsession with the immediate headline.
San Bartolomé is a municipality that moves forward when it does so united. We have demonstrated this many times. And I am convinced that, if we continue to bet on coexistence, respect, and collaboration, we will be able to face the challenges ahead with the same strength with which we have overcome previous ones.
We bid farewell to 2025 with the certainty that the best thing we can do for our municipality is to take care of it together. With less noise. With more conversations. With less haste and, yes, with more time to be better people.
