An everyday story of country folk

Peasant! is a tried and true insult amongst English-speakers and although ¡campesino! is not a tried and true Spanish insult, some urban Spaniards would not take it as a compliment.   Others might look puzzled and explain that they’re not from the country as it happens. In deepest Spain a chicken or two may still scratch around back doors but there is no shame and a fair amount of pride attached to being a campesino or countryman.



Being a country person is a matter of pride



Un campesino lives in, on or off the countryside – el campo, a word now so popular with foreign residents of all nationalities that they also use it in their own language. 

Another translation, labrador, is still a matter of pride in older people and, once again, provides little in the way of an insults. 

Un paisano is another peasant-sounding word you’d be forgiven for translating as countryman, but in practice it is nearer to fellow countryman and used by a Spaniard for anyone from his own neck of the woods. 

Paisano also indicates mufti, plain clothes so un militar vestido de paisano is an out-of-uniform soldier and un agente de paisano is a plainclothes policeman.

Intended barbs are more likely to hit home with gañán, paleto, cateto or hortera and with the first three we get there at last with words conveying identical scorn to an English-speaker’s peasant!

The original meaning of gañán was farmhand and the first entry in the Diccionario de la Lengua Española for un cateto is geometrical: either of the sides enclosing the right-angle in a right-angled triangle.  The second is a noncommittal villager followed by yokel, another insult favoured by city-dwellers. 

To be called un paleto is equally unflattering, as this implies a yokel or bumpkin who earns a living digging fields or shovelling manure with una pala – a spade.

When meant to offend, these three nouns have feminine versions - gañana, paleta, cateta – but hortera is both an adjective and noun.

Nominally the adjective means anything or anyone from la huerta – cultivated land or a market garden but these days hortera only ever means flashy, tacky, tasteless.  And things don’t get any better because un hortera or una hortera implies peasant of the unappreciated type.

La Huerta with capital letters refers to the intermittently fertile area stretching from Valencia to Murcia which was responsible for much of that area’s wealth before tourism.  To the urban poor as well as more austere and less prosperous inland farmers this affluence was too often manifested by ostentatious bad taste, which to this day continues to be described as hortera.

In the past when a Spaniard succeeded in making large amounts of money he – virtually never she – endeavoured to merge himself and his family into the landscape by living and behaving like the established, unostentatious gentry. 

Thankfully wealth is now more widely distributed and good taste is no longer a privilege of the privileged so being labelled un hortera or una hortera still hurts, not for being termed a peasant but for being considered a vulgar peasant.