Why not conjugate "haber" in this context?

Question

Fue fácil localizar la escuela pese a no haber estado antes.

I cam across this sentence in a book I am reading and I know that it means, "It was easy to find the school even though I had never been there before."

Are verbs not needed to be translated after "pese a"? Or am I missing something else?

Thank you kindly, Peter

Answer 1

Fue fácil localizar la escuela pese a no haber estado antes.

A more literal translation might be:

It was easy to locate the school despite not having been before.

Here the impersonal form of the verb "haber" acts the same way as its English counterpart "having."

On the other hand, when you consider this sentence:

It was easy to find the school even though I had never been there before.

A more literal translation might be:

Aunque no había estado allí antes, fue fácil localizar la escuela.

Notice that for the most part, the overall difference between these pairs of sentences has less to do with any semantic differences than it does with the varied syntactic arrangements available to state the same idea.

pesa a=prepositional phrase needs noun object (phrase in this case) - 0074b507, Apr 22, 2011

Well explained, Izan :) - FELIZ77, Apr 22, 2011