The critical reception of Jesus Moncada's work has been determined by critical debate that opposed rural literature and urban literature in the eighties of the twentieth century. From this perspective, the narrative of Moncada has been identified with the desire to preserve the memory of Mequinensa, disappeared under the water. The paper proposes a reading of author's work from the historiographic metafiction in which the exercise of memory is not to be understood as the desire to preserve against forgetting a lost world, but as a question about mechanisms of understanding of the real one, about conditionings and limits on access to knowledge of history and about relationship between fiction and reality. The main resources of historiographic metafiction analysed are: disrepute of memory, fantastic elements, fragmentation of narrative by marginal characters of story, intertextuality, loss of reliance on narrator and irony
