Some walkers want to have a look round a ruined factory, so conversation must be made with the security guard. He is truncheoning around with a muscular, aggressive, sleek-haired pup and a peaceful older bitch–Heinz 57 varieties with some dominant sheepdog: –Good morning, that’s a fine-looking pup you’ve got there. He’s going to be a…
This has been on the back burner for a while, but, following the fine example of Untergunther, it is hoped that work will soon be resumed on recladding all those farmhouses whose profitable stripped-stone effect is unauthentic and causes them to fall down sooner. Sheep-dyeing (thanks MM) is not done, although if they have just…
Folks seem to be going through a Kevin Johansen phase. Argentine music tends to Yankee-hating-up-Manu-Chao’s-arse bollocks, but “el Hugh Hefner Aragonés” is interesting and amusing:
Just found in a cabinet in an uninhabited house in the central Pyrenees: a concealed drawer that doesn’t appear to have been touched since the 1960s. Contents: a will from 1818; pages dealing with testaments torn a reprint of a revised (1930s?) version of the Spanish 1888-9 Civil Code, including annotations detailing regional variations (in…
I find that the rector of the church in Plan, Sobrarbe, Huesca, Spain blasts out his services over speakers, to the distress of neighbours without detachable hearing aids and to the alarm of sheep on the mountains. It’s not 140dB (source), but it ain’t good for tourism neither.
At stake in this terrible new conflict is nothing less than the question of whether the name of the place where the oranges come from is to be spelt Valéncia or València in standard Valencian, the former being the variant proposed by Àngel (that accent worries me) Calpe and other speakers of standard Valencian, while…
This is one reason why large numbers of Romanian shepherds, shearers and others are ending up in Spain. There’s an interesting collection of info here (beware stupid music and cursor) dealing with the history and organisation of transhumance in Spain. While the sheepway infrastructure still exists in the Balkans, lorry transport, improved roads and the…
The sheep and goats above have just arrived back in Plan from low pastures to spend the summer in the mountains, rather like schoolchildren coming back from a language exchange. Joaquín Costa’s Colectivismo agrario en España (1898), available in full on Corde, contains a number of accounts of communal herding arrangements in the Pyrenees: The…
Zazie thinks it’s OK to waste food. I’m still figuring how to cook this: My head might have videoed it but my stomach definitely would not. Enjoy your lunch!
The EU says that you have to take animal carcasses found in the high mountains down to the bottom, truck them half-way across Spain to an abattoir to make sure they’re really dead, and then, to stop the vultures starving to death, you are allowed to bring them all the way back and leave them…
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