The Leon writer Enrique Gil y Carrasco, born in 1815 in Villafranca del Bierzo, was one of the most prominent Spanish diplomats in Europe, and perhaps the first to study in depth the Prussian customs union, the Zollverein, a direct antecedent of the European trade treaties and the current European Union.
He was also a romantic writer, mainly remembered for the historicist romantic novel "El Señor de Bembibre" (1843), a masterpiece of Spanish fictional romantic prose, which follows the model of Walter Scott's novels.