One day in the mid 90s Rafael Merinos he quoted his classmate Javier Martin inside Blazon. “I have to ask you a favor: we Cordobans must help each other,” the former mayor came to tell him, who soon seated him around a table in the downtown restaurant accompanied by one of his lieutenants, Luis Martín, then president. of the Management of municipal planning.
-And what did Rafael want?
-Offer to be the first manager of Land Freed from the Cordoba Railway (Telfeco), to launch the Renfe Plan. He told me that I had very good relations with all the political parties and that it was good.
-What do you answer?
-Yes, but on two conditions: the first, that they give me a compatibility to be able to continue to exercise my activity as a lawyer and my position at the University. And the second, that they let me do what I wanted. I carried out the entire Renfe Plan: when I left my job after a few years, there was Telféco eleven billion old pesetas.
Javier Martin Fernándezborn in Córdoba 65 years ago, has combined, throughout his already long professional life, attention to the matters handled by his firm with academic dedication – he is professor of financial and tax law at the Complutense University – as well as with advice for many public administrations in Cordoba, Seville, Malaga And Madrid.
He was president of Montilla-Moriles Regulatory Councilposition in which he succeeded Manuel Pimentel: “I will continue as president if they ask me,” he emphasizes about the electoral process that the Appellation of Origin is going through, revolted by the suspension of the Tasting at the last spring. .
-You have the reputation of being in all the salsas in town. What is happening in Cordoba?
-In Córdoba, things are being prepared… Córdoba is… Listen, I am president of the Paradigma Foundation of Córdoba, which owns the Torre de la Calahorra and the Living Library of Al-Andalus which is located in the Palace of Bailío, and then they talk about the Córdoba of the Three Cultures and all that, and I think it’s more of a myth than anything else. The problem is that the inhabitants of Córdoba… You know that an important man from Córdoba invites the author of “The Discreet Fair” to the city for three months and gives him food and drink and takes perfect care of him, and after months of being here, he sent the copy of the book, and the Cordoba leader said: “How well I fed him, how well I took care of him and, above all, how he gave us represented well…”. The problem of Córdoba… When you walk through the old town you come across houses where people say: “But here there is only one small door”… Yes, but you are missing what there is inside. That’s the problem, that we’re too quiet a city. But at the same time as we are extremely discreet, we really like controversies. In addition, it is a very unrewarding city.
-Have you felt ingratitude in your flesh?
-No, because I always did what I couldn’t do. I am politically incorrect, I am in places because I want to be there, and therefore I do not have this feeling of ingratitude. From an economic point of view, cities grow when they believe in it, and Cordoba does not believe in it. Cordoba, perhaps because of this discretion I speak of, always sees that things cannot be achieved.
-But this city gave reason to believe certain things, right? You participated directly in the operation of the Renfe Plan, for example, which transformed it, and now we have the Logistics Base.
-The Renfe Plan must be linked to the Río Plan, which could be achieved thanks to the money obtained from the first. And at the Logistics Base, there are already people who criticize and say yes to the army, yes to weapons of mass destruction, yes to this and that. I have already said that you have to believe in it… In Andalusia, there is a city that has always believed in it: the best white shrimp in the world is that of Seville. And what about Malaga, which devours Seville and Barcelona. Because? Because they have a mayor and a way of thinking about the inhabitants of Malaga who, without having anything… Because we have the misfortune of having the mosque.
Martín is the eldest of four brothers
-Misfortune?
-Yes, it is our misfortune, because if we did not have the Mosque, people would go to see this marvel that is the Fernandina churches. And when I say that, I also talk about the pleasure of walking through the streets of Córdoba, because this city has enormous potential from a tourist point of view. In Malaga, there is now even Google, like all the technology companies in the world that are present.
-Before you said that Malaga had nothing.
-No. Let’s see. It has the coast, it has the port, which doesn’t matter. And above all, he has a way of being a guy who commands, who is an engineer even if he has never worked, with a square and open head at the same time.
-You also have Juanma Moreno at the head of the Junta de Andalucía.
-Yes, but Juanma arrives later. Malaga got where it is not thanks to Juanma. Here in Córdoba, just as the Renfe Plan was a catalyst to unify the city and transform it into a first-level logistics center, the Logistics Base can now mean a before and an after. The Renfe plan called on companies from outside, who said: “Hey, in Córdoba you can build and you can do things.” Until that moment we were not present, and now the same thing is happening to us with the Base. Look, next Tuesday, the Spanish national team is playing here: it’s putting the cities in their place, on stage.
-You are in contact with politics although from the outside: you praised the mayor of Malaga, but what do you think of the mayor of Córdoba and those who preceded him?
-Honestly, I think they did what they could. We have to thank the communist party for the urban planning we have. Malaga, for example, is a real disaster from an urban planning point of view. But Córdoba is a perfectly designed city, and we owe it to the Communist Party. Rafael Merino appreciated the work of Plan Renfe. When Rosa arrived, she continued the Renfe plan and dumped it into the river. The PSOE has also done things. Everyone contributed. What happens is that sometimes we demand certain things from politicians without taking into account the circumstances they have to struggle with.
“There are already people who criticize the Logistics Base: what if the Army, what if weapons of mass destruction…”
-Life and the economy have one rhythm and politics another. And maybe that leads to frustration.
-No, no, no. I’m not a nice guy, but I insist that everyone did what they could. The PSOE was faced with a terrible economic crisis: it was practically impossible to do better.
-He chairs the Bodegas Campos Foundation and played a fundamental role in the purchase of Pimpi de Málaga by Antonio Banderas, another flagship of Malaga.
-Málaga is no longer understood without Antonio Banderas, this is essential, because it has a very great media influence, almost more outside Spain than inside. Antonio’s purchase of Pimpi is due to the fact that he is in love with Malaga, and it was a way of being present on a banner of the city. I intervened in the operation.
-For a Cordovan, it is gratifying to walk through the center of Malaga and recognize a piece of your city in this restaurant.
-Please note that Pimpi was born to Paco Campos, the smallest Campos.
-Tito Paco.
-Yes, Tito Paco. At the time, for a series of unimportant reasons, he went to Malaga. The story is very funny and I think there are people who don’t know it: Pepe Cobos, Antonio Gala and Paco Campos left Cordoba in 1600 and stayed in Granada. And when they were there, Gala said to Paco: “Paco, it’s very cold here.” And so they went to Malaga and started visiting places and a concessionaire showed them the one in the Center where he had installed the Campos de Córdoba restaurant. Antonio Banderas who bought the building.
-Which project would you highlight among those you are currently working on?
-We want to create a museum on Al-Andalus in the Bailío Palace, or rather on Jewish, Islamic and Jewish culture. In Córdoba we need, as with eating, to establish a link between the city and the commercial area, because now we have focused everything on the file. And for a revolution to happen in the city, it is extremely important that tourism reaches the shopping centers. Let’s see: what is the only monument that people climb on the Cuesta del Bailío or Calle Nueva? The only thing that exists is the Christ of the Lanterns. And if private initiative, via the Paradigma Foundation and the Town Hall itself, created a kind of museum that would facilitate this link, it would be important. Look, in the Noreña silo there are hundreds of Roman sculptures, and I proposed when I was director of Telfeco that they be placed on the Paseo de Renfe, because it was a way of bringing people in the center. And man, now that we say that the historic center collapsed, well, it happens because the people of Córdoba failed to establish a connection between the center and the rest of the city.
