Born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1949, Néstor Sanmiguel Diest has spent most of his life in the medium-size Castilian town of Aranda de Duero. Despite his relative isolation, he was never a hermit, founding the art collectives A Ua Crag (1985–96), Segundo partido de la montaña (The Second Mountain Party, 1987–88), and Red District (1990–92) and maintaining intellectual and professional links with Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid. He has exhibited periodically in all three cities since the 1980s. A 2007 retrospective curated by Beatriz Herráez at MUSAC in León prompted much wider recognition of Sanmiguel