Domingo Sánchez saw the sea for the first time when he was 25 years old. “The spectacle of the sea,” as he later remembered, speechless. He was the son of “honest farmers” who had worked as a goatherd in his town, Fuenteguinaldo (Salamanca), and had studied thanks to the efforts of his mother, a woman from the countryside who had a “real addiction to reading” and recited entire chapters by heart. of The Quijote. On July 22, 1885, Sánchez hugged his parents, mounted a horse and trotted away. Ten days later, he sailed from Barcelona on a steamship bound for the Philippines, the remote Spanish colony named in honor of King Philip II. The man from Salamanca began a new life as a collector of exotic animals for the Overseas Ministry. “I was flattered by the idea of being an exploring naturalist, in whose profession I could see more than once in reality episodes from the novels of Jules Verne and Mayne Reid that excited me so much,” he wrote.
