Here we offer you seven mini-stories in podcast format that we have added to this second edition of Álvaro Cunqueiro's book De santos y milagros (Of Saints and Miracles) because of their potential to be dramatised as stories. These seven articles were selected from among the more than seventy stories that Cunqueiro published in various media throughout his life, never neglecting his Galician roots and his love of fantasy. César Antonio Molina said that ‘for Cunqueiro, saints are more like magicians, healers of the soul, doctors who heal people's souls’, and this is how these stories-articles are dressed, surprising us from beginning to end with their magic, humour and invention. Without a doubt, Cunqueiro transforms the genre of the article in these texts, which end up becoming stories, tales and anecdotes from an illusory world full of Galician tradition, classical literature and an encyclopaedic cultural heritage that allows our author to construct authentic universes in a page and a half.

‘La campana, el león y el balón’ is an article published in 1946 in Catolicismo magazine under the pseudonym Álvaro Labrada. It is one of the unpublished stories featured in this volume. Kipling, India, Africa, lions and bells feature in this magical tale, where sound effects immerse us and transport us to other possible worlds.  

Cunqueiro published ‘Artes suasorias’ in Faro de Vigo on 7 February 1962. Mice as a matter of state and the traps used to capture them lead us, thanks to the masterful pen of the writer from Mondoñedo, to a text full of irony and humour set in the heart of Victorian England.

‘Algunos milagros’ was published in Faro de Vigo on 27 July 1962. The apostle Saint James and his miracles are the protagonists of this text, in which characters worthy of a Merlin saga pass by the saint's tomb in Santiago de Compostela. 

‘Froilán con su lobo’ is the story of a boy who sees his donkey devoured by a wolf. Instead of killing the wolf, he takes it hostage and brings it to his village, forging an unusual relationship along the way. Rural Galicia and fiction come together naturally.

‘San Jorge mató al drgón’ is an article published in ‘El envés’ in Faro de Vigo on 24 April 1964, like the three previous ones, in which Cunqueiro reviews the medieval story of Saint George and the dragon in various traditions, mixing literary reality with medieval fiction and books of chivalry.

In ‘Brandán sale al mar’ (Brandan sets sail), our author places the hero Brandan, who is seeing the sea for the first time, in conversation with a sacred fish that will guide him to another possible universe. Published in Faro de Vigo on 15 May 1966, this is a delicate and magical piece of mini-fiction that revives many Celtic myths.

In 1969, Faro de Vigo's ‘El envés’ published ‘De niños prodigios’ (Child Prodigies), another of Cunqueiro's jaw-dropping story-articles. Based on a dictionary of angels he is creating, the Galician master offers us a constellation of real and fictional geniuses of the Renaissance, children who ended up becoming, many of them, great architects of Renaissance humanism, from Marsilio Ficino to Pico de la Mirandola, among others.