“Originally published in the April 9, 1951, issue of LIFE magazine, W. Eugene Smith’s photo essay, «Spanish Village», has been lauded for more than six decades as the most moving photographic portrait ever made of daily life in rural Spain during the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. But, as the years have passed, the most chilling image from the piece – the closed, hard faces of three members of Franco’s feared Guardia Civil – has been exalted to a point where the essays’ other masterful, evocative pictures have been largely forgotten.

In the 1951 article itself, meanwhile, that accompanied Smith’s pictures, the magazine told its readers:

The village of Deleitosa, a place of about 2,300 peasant people, sits on the high, dry, western Spanish tableland called Estramadura, about halfway between Madrid and the border of Portugal. Its name means “delightful”, which it no longer is, and its origins are obscure, though they may go back a thousand years to Spain’s Moorish period. In any event it is very old and LIFE photographer Eugene Smith, wandering off the main road into the village, found that its ways had advanced little since medieval times.

Many Deleitosans have never seen a railroad because the nearest one is 25 miles away. Mail comes in by burro. The nearest telephone is 12 miles away in another town. Deleitosa’s water system still consists of the sort of aqueducts and open wells from which villagers have drawn water for centuries … and the streets smell strongly of the villagers’ donkeys and pigs.

A small movie theater, which shows some American films, sits among the sprinkling of little shops near the main square. But the village scene is dominated now as always by the high, brown structure of the 16th century church, the center of society in Catholic Deleitosa. And the lives of the villagers are dominated as always by the bare and brutal problems of subsistence. For Deleitosa, barren of history, unfavored by nature, reduced by wars, lives in poverty – a poverty shared by nearly all and relieved only by the seasonal work of the soil, and the faith that sustains most Deleitosans from the hour of First Communion until the simple funeral that marks one’s end”. – Time & Life Pictures

With the straw already broken away, wheat kernels are swept into a pile and one of the women threshers tosses them up so the breeze can carry off the chaff. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

Genaro Curiel, 17, son of man planting beans, carries his crude wooden plow as he heads for work at a wage of 12 pesetas ($.30) and one meal a day. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

These stern men, enforcers of national law, are Franco's rural police. They patrol countryside, are feared by people in villages, which also have local police. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

Girls are taught in separate classes from the boys. Four rooms and four lay teachers handle all pupils, as many as 300 in winter, between the ages of 6 and 14. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

At mid-morning the sun beats down on clustered stone houses. In the distance is belfry of Deleitosa's church. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

Sometimes luck gives one family stony ground for threshing, another smooth. This brings arguments since the smooth ground makes for easier threshing – a process begun by driving burros over stalks with drag that loosens kernels. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

The youngest son in the Curiel family, 5-year-old Lutero, sweeps up manure from the street outside his home. It is carefully hoarded as fertilizer, will be used on the eight small fields the family owns or rents a few miles out of town. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

While his godfather holds him over a font, the priest Don Manuel dries the head of month-old Buenaventura Jimenez Morena after his baptism at village church. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

Out on a walk, the village priest, Don Manuel, 69, passes barred window and curtained door of a home. He has seldom meddled in politics – the village was bloodily split during the civil war – but sticks to ministry. Villagers like that. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

The Curiels eat thick bean and potato soup from common pot on dirt floor of their kitchen. The father, mother and four children all share the one bedroom. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

Lorenza Curiel, 7, is a sight for her young neighbors as she waits for her mother to lock door, take her to church. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

Beans planted, the villager presses hard on his flattened plow as it scrapes the dry soil back into furrows. A neighbor woman leads donkeys, one borrowed. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

A peasant woman moistens the fibers of locally grown flax as she joins them in a long strand which is spun tight by the spindle (right), then wrapped around it. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)

His wife, daughter, granddaughter and friends have their last earthly visit with a villager. (Photo by W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures)