Bartolomé de las Casas

Bartolomé de las Casas was a sixteenth-century Spanish friar who observed first-hand the atrocities committed by the conquistadores in Central and South America. In this film, Jan Hepworth (Head of Spanish at Winchester) explores an illustrated edition of Las Casas’s Destruction of the Indies, published in 1598, and discusses the author’s status as a pioneer of Human Rights and an inspiration for the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73).