Hache (Hugo Olivera)

Hache — full name Hugo Olivera — is the rebellious, motorcycle-riding protagonist of Federico Moccia's Spanish romantic novel Three Meters Above the Sky (Tres metros sobre el cielo), originally published in Italy and enormously popular across Spain and Latin America. A bad-boy from a wealthy but troubled background, Hache's reputation for recklessness and his defiance of the social conventions that govern his peer group make him both dangerous and irresistible to Babi, the responsible good girl whose world is the opposite of his.

Moccia's novel became a cultural phenomenon among Spanish-speaking teenagers, with Hache's leather jacket and motorcycle becoming iconic symbols of the romantic bad-boy type. The novel spawned sequels, film adaptations, and a generation of readers who identified with its central romance.

The Hache-Babi dynamic is the archetypal opposites-attract romance — their different social worlds, their different approaches to risk and consequence, and the genuine feeling that develops between them despite all predictions to the contrary give the novel its classic romantic appeal.

Begin with Three Meters Above the Sky.