Luis Berenguer y Moreno de Guerra (Ferrol, La Coruña, 11 December 1923 – San Fernando, Cádiz, 14 September 1979) was a Spanish writer.
Another paternal relation was General Dámaso Berenguer y Fusté (1873-1953), Presidente del Gobierno (i.e. Prime minister) during the short period called "Dictablanda", which in 1930 followed the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
Their daughter, Luis's mother, María Luisa Moreno de Guerra, was born aboard ship in the bay of Zamboanga at the moment that the Spanish flag was lowered in the islands: thus in the family it was always said that she was the last Spaniard of Filipinos.
Many more distant ancestors on Luis Berenguer's mother's side (the Moreno de Guerra, Macé, Croquer y Tiscar) played distinguished roles in the history of San Fernando.
His great-grandfather, Juan Nepomuceno Moreno de Guerra y Macé, was the Mayor of the city in 1846-1847, Member of Parliament, hereditary Knight of Ronda and rich landowner, who donated land for a public park in San Fernando (which still exists under his name) in 1853.
At the beginning of the Civil War, however, his father Rafael Berenguer de las Cagigas was on leave in Madrid, having just disembarked from his ship Cervantes.
His wife and his three children, plus two nephews who had just lost their parents in the bombing of Madrid, were taken in due course to La Aljorra outside Cartagena, where Rafael, her husband and still a prisoner, had been put to work as a doctor.
The year in the United States (1956-1957) was very pleasant for him: the comfortable "American way of life" bore no comparison with the poor standard of living in Spain; neither did the ease of social relationships.
From these encounters came the inspiration for a series of biographical sketches, of which the most important was that of José Ruiz Morales (Alcalá de los Gazules, 1927 - Marbella, 1996), better known by everybody as “Perea”.
In prison he learns that the woman he loves is going to have a baby and he cannot bear the idea that his child should grow up ashamed of his father because he had been condemned as a vago y maleante, a vagabond and evil-doer.
Juan Lobón embodied many of Berenguer's ideals: a primitive man, strong, free, honest, funny and generous; who, acting as if still in the hunter-gatherer era of human development, confronts the landowners and the civil authorities, convinced that nobody has the right to enclose the land and that wild animals and birds exist to provide food for the hunter.
Lobón is the incarnation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's good savage; and, as another critic said, a border-line individual, between a gaucho and a cowboy, inside one of the great landed estates of Andalusia.
The natural environment of Lobón is that of traditional Andalusia, a countryside in deep crisis where a primitive economy still existed, based on hunting and gathering (asparagus, snails, palm hearts, mushrooms, heather roots).
After the success of his first book Berenguer, with the discipline of a professional writer, published five more novels with different, though often related, themes: The hard life of the fishermen along the Cádiz coast (Marea escorada, "High Tide" 1969); the insuperable tensions between landowners and peasants in the Andalusian countryside (Lena Verde, "Green Firewood", 1972); the historic neglect leading to the eventual defeat of naval officers sent out to the colonies in the 19th century (Sotavento.
Crónica de los olvidados, "Leeward, chronicle of the Forgotten Ones", 1973); the decline of the old seigneurial class and the arrival of new money in the countryside (La noche de Catalina virgen "The Night of Catalina the Virgin", 1975); and, finally, the feeling of alienation felt by those trapped by their education and their past and thus left behind by the modern world (Tamatea, novia del otoño, "Tamatea, Autumn's Girlfriend", published posthumously in 1980).
The author would also have been very pleased to see just how many words, previously only current in Andalusia, have now been incorporated into the Diccionario del Español Actual (1999, 2011), thanks to him and to the power of the characters that he created.