The Hearth

My first day of interviews at my second field site, a valley of about 1500 people with some 30 herding households.  The sky is grey and low with clouds covering the high peaks of the Pyrenees and mist hanging in the valleys.  The pine-covered mountain ridges that ring the valley are frosted in snow.  Though the trees in the valley bottoms are bare now, the grass in the meadows is still green from the winter rains.  Here in the valley bottom the cattle, sheep and horses graze throughout much of the winter, though they are also provided with supplemental feed in the form of hay cut from these same meadows in June and August, and purchased grain.  Just visible under the cloud cover at the head of the valley are the lower reaches of the high peaks, blanketed in snow.  In the morning I speak with a recently retired cattle herder, who takes me to his sister’s kitchen for our talk.  His brother in law, also a retired herder, joins us for a while.  The room feels warm when I come in from the damp grey weather outside, but as the hour passes, it feels cooler and cooler.  Like many of the old stone houses in these villages, this one likely has no central heating, only an old wood cook stove to heat the kitchen (in addition to an electric range to cook on) and plug-in electric heaters that are only plugged in when absolutely necessary to spare the expense.  The cook stove is unlit this day.  Over the past month I have sat in quite a few different kitchens for interviews, many made over with modern conveniences, but most still retain the a cook stove with a wood-burning compartment. 

The last interview of the day takes place in the late afternoon.  The herder finds me waiting at our appointed meeting spot near the lone gas station in the valley, and I follow his truck in mine to the outskirts of the village where smoke curled up from the chimney of an outbuilding beside an old farmhouse.  “You can talk with me and another boy here,” he says, “We both received your letter.”  I send out a letter to all the livestock producers on the official town list in order to introduce the project and invite their participation.  The “other boy” turns out to be a retired sheepman well into his 6^th decade of life.  The building is his—an old kitchen with an open hearth and a long table pushed against the far wall.  A few plastic chairs and some wooden stools are arranged in front of an open fireplace and we sat in a semicircle around the hearth.  Soon after we settle into our chat we are joined by a third herder, who had seen the smoke from the chimney and come to investigate.  He is a cattleman, a bit younger than the other two.  Usually my interviews for this project are one-on-one, but this small group works well, and for two hours we have a lively discussion about the changes in the valley’s vegetation and herders’ management practices, and the possible future of livestock husbandry in the valley.  There are two sheepmen and one cattle herder, which makes for an interesting discussion and diversity of viewpoints, as cattle and sheep herders have not always gotten along here, use different summer pasture areas, and differ in some of their management practices.  Although they insist that there is generally little cooperation and collective action among livestock owners in the valley, and that livestock producers here tend to be individualistic, these men seem quite comfortable exchanging ideas and expressing opinions in each other’s presence.  They all agree that cooperation is the only way for them to overcome the current challenges faced by mountain livestock producers—stagnant prices and soaring costs, an indifferent government administration, mountains of paperwork and crushing regulations, and the environmental changes that are reducing the quality and quantity of pastures yearly—yet they are equally convinced that their community of herders is incapable of the level or type of cooperation needed.  When I mention at the end of the interview that I will be presenting a preliminary report of the results of our project in a community meeting later in the winter, they seem interested.  When I ask if they think that the results could be helpful to them at all in addressing the issues they face, to my surprise they are quite adamant that research indeed could be useful to them.  The government, they believed will pay more attention to their concerns if they are presented as the result of a scientific investigation. 

By the end of the afternoon dusk has fallen.  I call home to ask my older child to pick up the younger one from school.  After the formal tape recorded part of the interview ends, we continue to chat for a while in front of the fire, which crackles in the open hearth before us.  The rafters of this one-room kitchen are hung with sheep and goat bells—several dozen smaller bells (esquilas) for the sheep and two enormous cañones worn by the lead goats in a herd.  On the rafter behind the equilas hang different sized pots of the sort that herders once used to cook on an open fire in the mountain pastures.  The most typical food were migas, bread crumbs fried in fat and adorned with bits ham or mutton.  Village people used to bake enormous loaves weighing several kilograms in communal ovens, to keep the bread from going stale over many days in the mountains.  Each day the shepherd would cut a hunk off the loaf and break it into smaller chunks to prepare the meal of migas.  Herders often gathered together to eat their ¨crumbs¨ from a single pot over the fire—pots like those dandling from the rafters.  When I admire these artifacts of the herding profession the older man takes down his zamarro and buckles it on.  The zamarro is a tanned goat-skin cloak which is worn hair-side out as the shepherd´s protective garment.  I experienced a time-warp then, to think that in this lifetime, in fact not very many years ago, a herder dressed in a goatskin to keep off the mountain rain and sleet.  And he stands before me now, in the firelight, with the skin wrapped around him and the tools of his livelihood arrayed on the rafters above—bells, pots, branding iron—proclaiming that sheep herding would soon be no more.  There is a moment of disbelief on my part.  How could a way of living so well adapted to this environment, so much a part of this landscape and culture that a very similar cloak could have kept a shepherd dry in the year 836, or even a millennium before, vanish over the course of a few decades? The question lingers while the fire summons memories of my own days as a sheepherder, lying on a pile of horse blankets under a canvas tarp in Wyoming´s Salt River Range, fighting off sleep after a long day´s ride and listening to the Basque men I worked with speaking in the soft syllables of their native tongue as they cooked supper on the campfire.  Those men have gone home now.  The herds they tended have been sold.  And in Mongolia, falling asleep in a ger (yurt) on a mid-winter night, sharing the space warmed by the dung-fire with a family of 5 or 6 or 8 people, listening to the night sounds of animals breathing, snuffling, suckling.  In Mongolia, another hard winter is coming now, and many animals could perish.  Pastoralism is an elemental way of life, animals kept by people to make a living from landscapes that are otherwise too dry, too steep, or too remote to make a living from.  These are social-ecological systems simultaneously simple and complex, ancient and actual, always evolving yet seemingly timeless.  The old man removes his goatskin cloak and stokes the fire.  I pick up my digital audio-recorder, beep open the doors of my truck with the keyless entry system, and drive 30 minutes through the rainy darkness towards my rented apartment lit by compact fluorescent light bulbs.    

The Romance of Transhumance--Not!

A month ago I took part, for a day, in an ancient migration of herds from the rugged high mountain pastures of the Pyrenees to the flat and cultivated lands of the Ebro River floodplain.  I participated in the third day of an 8 day trek with a flock of 1300 ewes and 600 goats belonging to one of the herders in my study site.  He is one of only 2 or 3 remaining transhumant sheep herders in this valley, where 30 years ago every livestock owning family (almost all the households in the community) made this seasonal journey in the fall, and returned to the mountains on the reverse trek the following spring. So why did transhumance develop and persist as an important practice for so long?  Why was the practice abandoned by many herders in the 20^th century? What was lost with the end of transhumance and what could be regained by reinstating or strengthening this practice? Here I will try to give a thumbnail sketch of the history and logic of transhumance in general, and then recount what I have been learning from my conversations with many former and a few current transhumant herders in this valley.

Transhumance is a repeated pattern of seasonal movements of livestock and people, usually from north to south or highlands to lowlands.  The English term has its origins in the Spanish word “trashumancia,” with the Latin roots “tras” signifying “change” and “humus” meaning “earth”. So trashumancia is a change of earth (or territory or pastures). For centuries if not millennia, herders in many regions of Spain have practiced transhumance, guiding their herds (mostly sheep) from summer pastures in the mountains of the north and east of Spain to winter pastures on the plains in the south and west.  Some of these stock routes historically traversed almost the entire width or length of the peninsula, while others were shorter, but still often covered 100s of kilometers and entailed a month of daily movements on foot.  There is a rich body of scholarship on Spanish transhumance as this practice and the associated institution of the Mesta, an organization formed in the 13^th century to secure and govern rights over the long-distance stock driveways, have major cultural, socio-economic and political significance in Spain’s history.  The Mesta was abolished in the 1836 but many of the stock routes remain, criss-crossing the peninsula, and a recent resurgence of interest in the practice of transhumance for its cultural and ecological significance has led to new legislation protecting these corridors and drovers’ rights to use them. 

Some scholars theorize that transhumance in Spain is very ancient, dating back to the origins of domestic livestock husbandry on the peninsula, and that it basically mimics the movements of wild herbivores following the seasonal availability of forage, and associated fluctuations in forage quality (usually thought of as the proportion of protein and energy relative to fiber), and avoiding areas rendered seasonally inaccessible or inhospitable due to deep snow or cold temperatures.  In the Pyrenees where I am currently based, the summer pastures in the high mountains offer abundant, high-quality forage from mid-summer to early autumn, enabling animals to gain weight rapidly during these months.  However, by early fall the temperatures begin to drop and by late October or early November a sudden snowfall can trap animals and strand them in the mountains.  So the herders in this valley play a gambling game of sorts—they want to leave their herds on the mountains as long as possible, in order to exploit the benefits of the high quality and inexpensive mountain forage—but not so long as to run the risk of losing their flock in a winter storm and having to undertake a laborious and potentially dangerous rescue.  In other valleys the herds traditionally spent several autumn months in the middle mountains, the wooded foothills of the Pyrenees surrounding their villages, where animals grazed on lower quality forage that enabled them to maintain their fat reserves.  In this valley, however, the steep and narrow configuration of the valley and the now dominant forest vegetation precludes a longer stay at mid-elevations.  Thus the transhumant herds here move directly from the mountain pastures to the plains below, 8-14 days or more distant by foot.  On the plains, the climate and vegetation are Mediterranean, dominated by winter rains and warmer temperatures that allow active plant growth throughout the winter.  Here the grasses dry out and die in the spring, just when the mountain pastures are beginning to grow again, signaling the time to make the reverse trek back to the high pastures again.  This is the ecological and economic logic of transhumance—to exploit and adapt to the natural cycles of plant growth and weather to feed herds on natural vegetation with few or no external inputs (e.g. cultivated feed, fertilizer, etc.).  Researchers have now documented a number of other ecological benefits of transhumance, but I will save these for another post.

So why would livestock owners abandon a practice so well-adapted to the natural resources and variability of their environment, and one that enabled them to harvest natural forage at minimal cost and reap the profits by selling their fattened animals, wool, milk and other animal products? There are probably several ways to answer this question, and a full answer would entail many complex interactions at different scales.  Clearly there were larger forces of globalization and economic change at work which have affected markets for livestock products in Spain as elsewhere in the developed world, promoted more intensive (and high-investment) systems of production, and imposed a series of regulations related to animal and environmental health and food safety that make it difficult or impossible for Spanish herders to process and direct market their own livestock products (like artisanal cheese or natural lamb). Economic changes also led to increasingly intensive use of the flat lands in the Ebro River valley that constituted the traditional winter pastures for the Pyrenean herders.  More of this land was put into cultivation and less natural pasture remained, and the price to rent pasture or croplands (and graze the crops or crop aftermath in situ) increased together with the competition for these increasingly scarce resources.  So part of the economic rationale for transhumance—using animals to harvest inexpensive forage—began to disappear. 

But perhaps as important as the diminishing economic efficiency of transhumance was the human and social cost of this practice.  As an outsider I brought with me to the Pyrenees a romantic vision of transhumance as a folkloric cultural tradition apart from its economic and ecological rationales.  The archetypical image of the independent and free-roaming Spanish herder with his beret and bota (skin flask) and herders’ staff, leading his flock along an ancient drovers’ road led me to imagine that transhumance was a practice that herders abandoned reluctantly, and which they might recall with nostalgia. I was wrong.  Transhumance was a practice, at least in this region, that was employed out of necessity.  And while it required great skill and knowledge, it was also a grueling life that took a significant toll on those who were responsible for the day to day care of the flocks.  Many transhumant herders never married or had families—they spent too much time away from their home villages for this—and were often the bachelor brothers of the household.  I have now interviewed quite a few herders who were transhumant in their youth and abandoned the practice later, often around the time they decided to marry.  They describe spending the 7 months of winter (from November to May) in miserable conditions on the Ebro River plains, often living in an unheated hut, with one set of clothing they never washed, 25 km from the nearest inhabited village with no transportation but their own feet or perhaps a burro.  The social isolation and physical discomfort were great, and some herders have described how at the end of the 7 months they felt they were little different from wild beasts like the javalí (wild boar) in appearance and mentality.  One man described how upon returning to his home village in the spring, he could barely bring himself to walk down the village street in the evening, so timid and shy of other people he had become. On one occasion, he ventured out to the corner and then retreated in fear to his doorway. He emphasized that this was not his natural temperament—ordinarily he was a garrulous young man who enjoyed going out with his friends to the bars of an evening, but the months of winter isolation affected his psychological state.  When this man decided to marry in his thirties, he became one of the first in his village to build a barn on land near the village and overwinter his flock in the barn, feeding them grain and hay he purchased throughout the winter months.  It may still have made economic sense to be transhumant, but the social cost was too great for him.  He wanted to be able to live with his wife and raise his own children.  In his words, to live year-round in his home village was “going to heaven.”  This herder still takes advantage of the abundant and cheap summer pastures in the mountains from May until October, but the summer months too have been made much easier by the introduction of portable electric fences which keep the herds of different owners from mixing on the mountain commons and allow the livestock owners to live in the village and drive in their trucks to check on their herds every few days.  

So, what of the young transhumant herder that I accompanied on one leg of his journey last month?  Why has his family maintained this tradition when most of the others have abandoned it?  First, he is an extraordinary individual, with seemingly boundless energy and a great love of and enthusiasm for his occupation.  His father, now retired, was a renowned herder in this village.  This man (the son) tried to lead a different life, which his parents strongly encouraged.  He sold most of the family’s flock and became a professional truck driver.  But 6 months later he returned home, bought back his sheep, and once again became a full-time herder.  One difference in this family is that the father married a woman whose home village was in the winter pasture area on the plain.  Early in their marriage she decided that instead of staying in the mountain village alone all winter, she would accompany her husband on the annual trek to the lowlands, and rented an apartment where they could live together in the winter months, then trek together back to his home village for the summer.  For 30 some years this couple made the annual trek together, accompanied by their children, who attended school in the wintertime village on the plains and spent the summers in the mountain pastures with their father and in the mountain village with their mother.  Thus, this family found a way to overcome the social costs and isolation of the transhumant life.  The current generation benefits from improved roads and vehicles that enable the herder to remain based in the mountain village and travel back and forth to check on his herds on the plains throughout the winter.  His parents still spend the winter in the lowlands, in part to avoid the difficulties of negotiating the mountain cold and snow in their older years.  The family’s long-term relationships with landowners in the lowlands ensure that the herder has sufficient pastures and crop fields to rent each year to support his flocks.  It still makes economic sense for him to be transhumant, and he has the character and passion for the mountains and his animals that enable him to sustain, for the moment, the frenetic lifestyle of a modern-day transhumant herder. 

Dilemmas of a Blogging Researcher

Well, it has been a while since I last posted and several of my readers have inquired what I have been up to.  It is nice to know that you are out there reading the blog!  In short, all is well here in Spain, but the pace of work has picked up and as I have been diving into real fieldwork, I have been focusing more on the scientific aspects of my work and less on the weekend family adventures.  I have been spending more time in the field during the week and more at home with domestic tasks on the weekends.  I have also been faced with some practical and ethical dilemmas about what to post.  Most of my thoughts and observations lately are very linked to my emerging findings and reflections as a researcher.  I have three dilemmas related to posting my research-based impressions and reflections before they are fully analyzed.  First, if I write my reflections here while they are still in the form of impressions, rather than thoroughly analyzed data, I run the risk of conveying incomplete or misleading information.  (On the other hand, it may be revealing and instructive to transparently share the thought processes of a researcher in the thick of things.) Second, posting preliminary findings on the web makes them vulnerable to potential (mis)appropriation by others before we are able to publish them, which could lead to propagation of incomplete or inaccurate information as well as loss of intellectual property for the researcher and her community partners.  Third, and perhaps most important, my current work involves interviewing herders.  These interviewees are “human subjects” in my research and have gone through a formal informed consent process in which I committed, as the researcher, to maintain their identities in confidence and to use the information they provide for research purposes only.  As entertaining and enlightening as it would be to describe some of these interactions, I do not wish to betray the confidence of the research participants at a stage when we are still getting to know one another and building trust.  It is quite different to post the research findings in summary form after the study is complete and the participants have had the opportunity to provide feedback on preliminary interpretations and results.  So, I am going to proceed cautiously with my next posts and would welcome feedback from any readers about how to address these potential challenges.

The Perils and Pleasures of Time Travel

Last week I drove with F., and D., to the village of San Juan de Plan on the east side of Ordesa National Park.  San Juan de Plan is one of 3 small villages in the Valle de Gistain, which lies between Ordesa to the west and Parque Natural Posets-Maladeta to the east.  F. and D. have been working with the herders in this valley in the late 1970s and have a warm and close relationship with their local collaborators.  The valley is remarkable in that it has retained more of the traditional land management and husbandry practices, and hence a more traditional appearance of the landscape, than many other valleys in the Central Pyrenees. F. and D. thought it would be useful for me to visit the valley as a reference point to understand the other valleys where I will carry out my study, and it was.  When I say “traditional” I should qualify this a bit—it is easy for a foreigner, especially one from the US, to get caught up in the mists of history and imagine that the landscape is a medieval one to match the Romanesque churches or the ancient Roman footpaths. Actually, the landscape and practices have evolved and changed continuously, and the management system and landscape that is now perceived as “traditional” actually is only a remnant of the mid-20^th century.  Let me explain.

The slopes of this small valley are extremely steep, but have nonetheless been terraced for centuries.  Originally, these terraces were planted with cereal grains—wheat, rye, barley--and much later potatoes.  Livestock grazed on the crop aftermath and fertilized the fields with their manure.  Cultivation followed a cycle of planting and fallowing, so that only one side of the valley was planted in a given year and the other side was fallowed and available for grazing.  Beginning in the 1950s the cultivation of cereals  began to decline and the crop fields were converted to perennial meadows (“prados”) which are cut for hay and also grazed.  On the lower slopes of the valley these small meadows are enclosed with hedgerows or stone fences and are privately owned.  One producer usually possesses a series of these meadows in a progression up the side of the valley so that in spring they move their animals slowly upslope from one meadow to the next until they reach the communal summer pastures.  On the upper slopes, between the prados and the communal pastures, lie the “panares.”  The panares (named for the “pan” or bread that the grains provided) were also cropped for grains, and cultivation here continued after the lower fields had already been converted to meadows. Rights to cultivate the panares were individually owned, but the right to graze the aftermath was communal.  Thus, after the individual producer planted and harvested, the livestock of any villager was allowed to graze the stubble.  These fields remain unfenced and unenclosed, and enclosure is forbidden.  In several of the panares and prados we noticed wooden poles planted in the middle of the field and capped with an overturned bucket or empty feed sack.  This, F. explained, is a sign that indicates that the field is not to be grazed this year.  The panares are no longer cultivated, and now are used for hay and grazed in the autumn, under the same tenure regime (hay crop is individually owned and the grazing of aftermath is communal). 

Another aspect of the traditional landscape is the lopping of ash trees.  In San Juan de Plan, villagers still cut the branches of ash trees growing in and at the edges of their meadows to dry and feed to their livestock in winter.  This practice produces trees of an unusual form from the repeated lopping and re-sprouting—sort of like multiple lollypops on one stick—that are a characteristic of this cultural landscape.  Apparently this practice was once widespread throughout the central Pyrenees, but this is one of the last valleys where it is still carried out.

Although the community is traditional in some ways, it is also an engine of innovation and is recognized regionally for its commitment to sustainability.  The reason for our trip to San Juan de Plan was an upcoming event in Zaragoza where the herders of the entire valley will be awarded a prize by the Spanish Foundation for Ecology and Development, in recognition of their sustainable practices and maintenance of a vibrant cultural landscape.  F. and D. were making the visit to help the herders prepare their presentation for the award ceremony this week.  Like most communities of any size that have their act together, San Juan de Plan has several movers and shakers, including both natives of the village and outsiders who contribute their energy, skills and ideas.  One of the foremost indigenous innovators is the former mayor, a short, solid and energetic woman in her 60’s (I guessed).  When we met, J. was dressed in loose-fitting ankle-length military green trousers, a bright red tropical-looking shirt, and a pair of plastic gardening clogs.  Her chin-length grey hair was a bit unkempt and she peered at us intently through a pair of narrow spectacles perched on the bridge of her nose as she spoke with great animation. J. was clearly a fireball of energy and an effective squeaky wheel.  Forewarned of our impending visit, she had a large bag of produce ready to give F. and a pot of beans cooking to feed him, but we couldn’t stay.  She rattled off a list of complaints and requests in short order and sent us packing with the load of fresh vegetables from her garden and promises to return soon, make strategic phone calls to assist the local dance troupe in negotiating a performance, and help her locate a source for rye straw to weave large saucer-like baskets to place under potted plants. 

Another local engine is a couple originally from outside the village, R. and E.  R. is a musician who works as the community’s “animador cultural,” including helping with various projects and activities related to livestock, and his wife E. originally came to the valley to teach the local dialect, Chistavino.  Chistavino is a living language, one of many dialects (or, some would argue distinct languages) that evolved in each of the isolated Pyrenean valleys after the fall of the Roman Empire.  According to F., as Latin disintegrated or evolved following the withdrawal of Roman influence, it developed into many distinct dialects/languages in the different isolated Pyrenean valleys, one of which is Chistavino. During the meeting with the herders over lunch, I was frustrated not to understand much of the conversation swirling around me and chalked my lack of comprehension up to the background noise and my rusty Spanish.  Only later did I discover that my neighbors at the table were lapsing into Chistavino when they conversed among themselves—I didn’t understand not because my Spanish was poor, but because they were speaking in an entirely different tongue.  

Despite finishing off lunch with a strong coffee, I was certain that I would fall soundly asleep on the drive home, but it was not to be.  D. decided (I think for my benefit) that we should go home on a different route—through Ordesa National Park.  We turned off the mai” road into the Park and proceeded to wind along the River Vellos through a fantastic canyon of sheer limestone walls, populated with several endemic plant species found only growing on the sides of this canyon.  The one-lane, one-way road was carved into the canyon wall about half way between the roaring glacial stream at the canyon’s bottom and the canyon rim far above.  As D. and F. pointed out, the road was remarkable in how little it intruded in the canyon and how relatively little disturbance it had created to the surrounding splendor.  Although the road was paved and had a guard rail on the river side, it felt more like an old Roman road than a 20^th century one.  At one point, before the road climbed out of the canyon, D. insisted we park and walk a short distance down one of the footpaths towards a hermitage on the other side of the river.  Here, two foot bridges cross the river before the path heads up a tributary canyon towards one of the high passes in the park.  First, we crossed over a modern bridge of steel and concrete with a green-painted chain link fence to prevent visitors from meeting an untimely end at the canyon bottom.  The view over the railing towards the blue-green glacial waters below was dizzying, but the view skywards up the canyon walls and to the peaks beyond was awe-inspiring, rivaling the jaw-dropping sensation of standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon for the first time.  When we reached the other side of the river on the modern bridge, we descended a short way down a gravel path and then returned via a stone footbridge dating to medieval or possibly Roman times.  Here was cause to wonder not only at natural marvels but the courage of the man or men who laid the keystones to make the ancient bridge whole, and the skill of the person who designed it.  The mists of history had me now and I had no desire to exorcise their bewitching power.  Standing on a Roman bridge as the icy waters tumbled far under me and the mist floated in front of the peaks high above gave the sensation of being suspended in both space and time, hanging in the air between millennia, as if I might look up and see a hooded monk making his way across the bridge towards me on his way to the hermitage beyond, sandals slapping on the wet stones and the odor of damp wool rising from his cloak.  

Be Careful What You Order

I had a “be careful what you order” experience on Saturday.  Saturday was the first sunny day after several days of clouds and rain, and I insisted we go on a short walk from the center of Jaca to the nearby Medieval bridge, the Puente de San Miguel.  After we walked back the kids chose a restaurant, “L”, where we had lunch.  “L” specializes in a sort of nouvelle-Aragonés cuisine, updated or reinvented interpretations of traditional regional dishes.  It is very Aragonés; not so much nouvelle.  The “menu del día” (the set price menu) had lots to choose from and the kids each found things they liked.  My daughter ordered melón con jamón and a bistek and my son had the children’s menu (spaghetti and chicken “nuggets” with fries).  I decided to have gazpacho to commemorate the end of summer, and to be adventurous ordered something called “manitas de cordero en salsa de almendra.” Cordero, of course, is lamb.  Manitas, means little hands, and I did not know what this was, exactly, but I love lamb and envisioned some little chunks of meat in an interesting almond-based sauce.  What arrived in front of me was a cazuela (an earthenware baking dish) containing, as far as I could determine, an entrée consisting of gelatinous tendons and bones, breaded and cooked in a brownish sauce.  I tried in vain to excavate some meat from the dish, and took a few tastes of the sauce, but the tendons were so unappetizing, I really couldn’t stomach it.  The children had a great time ribbing me with “Now you know how we feel when you cook [insert vegetable here—e.g. zucchini, eggplant].”  I told them that, in the future, instead of saying “Ew, gross, Mom, that’s disgusting,” when I serve something they find less than mouth-watering, they need only utter the phrase “manitas de cordero” to communicate the lack of appeal.  I later googled “manitas de cordero” just to see, and was surprised when dozens of recipes popped up.  Clearly this is a dish that many people prepare and consume with relish. The first recipe that I clicked on was accompanied by a photo of 4 delicate and snowy white lamb hoofs and lower legs presented on a bed of lettuce.  Mystery solved.  I was humbled by the experience.  The ethnographer in me was shamed by my inability to consume with enthusiasm (or even without it) a typical local dish. I reminded myself of all the viscera and other animal parts I have eaten in Mongolia (marmots, goat cheeks), but to no avail.  I ate my delicious home-made arroz con leche (rice pudding) for dessert and vowed to ask before ordering in the future. 

A Trip to the Countryside

This morning I rode with F., my scientific host, and M., a young ecologist who does work with satellite imagery, to the town of Broto in the Tena Valley, just outside Ordessa National Park.  (Note, because this is a blog accessible to the public, I will mostly refrain from identifying people by name.) F. and M. are helping to organize a meeting that is taking place in a few weeks for a large international project, the theme of which is closely related to my own research interest in resilience of pastoral social-ecological systems.  Research team members will be coming from three other countries and one other continent to take part in the excursion and meeting and they were scouting locations for meeting rooms, lunch and coffee breaks along the way—making sure the rooms were large enough to accommodate 30 participants, warm enough to sit for several hours on a potentially chilly October morning, etc. As we drove up and back, F. regaled me with information—too much to absorb—on the history, geography, and management of the area.  Accustomed to working with foreigners, he speaks very clearly and slowly, and is patient with my vocabulary questions, but it is just too much to take in at once.

One of the most interesting tidbits for me related to the pattern of human population expansion and contraction and the subsequent changes in land use and landscape cover. According to F., the human population in the Pyrenees increased dramatically during the Moorish invasion of Iberia in the 8^th century, when people fled from the plains to take refuge in the more rugged and remote mountain areas.  The population grew rapidly to the point that hunting, gathering, and rudimentary agriculture could no longer sustain it and more intensive forms of cultivation and animal husbandry were developed.  As we drove up the narrow and very windy road through the Valle de Tena, F. pointed out the terraced lands on the steep hill slopes, now mostly obscured by the shrubs and forests that have overgrown them.  All of these were at one time cropped with wheat and later potatoes, then, more recently, cultivation was abandoned and the terraces were colonized by grasses and harvested for hay or grazed.  In the most recent era of rural depopulation, since the 1960s, many of these terraces have been abandoned entirely and the shrubs and forests have again taken over.  We saw occasional cleared patches in the brush or forested slopes, places where a few conscientious landowners or the very few remaining pastoralists have maintained the meadows for grazing or haying. 

Our first stop was a bar where F. and M. are considering holding the morning coffee break for the field tour.  They wanted to see if it was large enough for 30 to stand or sit comfortably while sipping their “cortados” (small coffees).  At the bar we fortuitously encountered one of F.’s friends and collaborators, a local veterinarian and livestock owner, A.  F. later told us that A. has cattle, goats and horses and is seeking to use his mares to breed mules.  What would the mules be used for?  I asked.  Apparently there is a new regulation that provides some type of incentive, a discounted price or priority access, to people who log using drought animals instead of tractors/skidders.  The mule-drawn equipment is lighter and causes less damage to the soil.  In addition, it is a way to maintain a traditional skill and practice. 

Our next stop (after a narrow tunnel through the mountain with a mysterious and ill-timed traffic light at either end—timed so that vehicles driving in towards each other from opposite directions both seemed to have the green light at the same time instead of one green and one read) was the village of Linas de Broto.  Unlike the larger town of Biescas that we drove through on the way there, Linas de Broto has been restored but remains relatively intact and “autentico” in F.’s words.  Biescas, in contrast, is quickly expanding with many new apartment buildings on its fringes, albeit most of them tastefully constructed of stone veneer to match the traditional architecture.  In Linas de Broto, we stopped at the Mayor’s house to get the keys to the town hall (Ayuntamiento) and discuss the use of a meeting room for the field tour.  The remodeled and comfortable town assembly chambers were a bit on the small side for a group that might be as large as 30, so we moved on to the old school house.  The single school room was much more spacious, though unheated, and today was filled with many church pews, in the process of being re-varnished and polished in preparation for the Broto village fiesta at the end of September.  The view out the large windows was pleasant and we agreed that this would be a good meeting room if it were warm enough and we could transport the comfortable chairs from the town hall to the school. 

The short walk from the Ayuntamiento to the school took us down an old cobble stone street past the well-kept but seemingly ancient traditional stone-faced houses of the village.  I noticed that several of the wooden doors had a fir branch (needles now dried and brown with age) stuck in the wrought iron grate of the door.  What did these branches signify? I asked.  Ah, they keep with witches and bad spirits away.  Pointing at the chimneys on these old buildings, F. explained that these round chimneys with pointed roofs on top are typical of this region and not found elsewhere.  The pointed stone on the chimney top also serves to ward off the “brujas” (witches).  Another roof had a pointy stone at one end, apart from the chimney, for good measure.  Many of the village houses, built in the old style where animals were kept below and the people lived above, included small gardens behind high stone walls, where pear and apple trees and vegetables were growing.  A man strolled past us with a large handful of fresh leeks.  On one building the second story was a hay loft with an open door.  I look forward to visiting Broto again in on a coming weekend for the fall livestock fair (“feria de ganado”).   

Continuity and Change

Pastoralism in the Pyrenees dates back to the Neolithic, it is thought, and beginning in the early Middle Ages the herding culture in these high valleys of the Pyrenees of Aragon changed relatively little for hundreds of years—until the 20th century. The written record, where it exists, of village rules, court cases and household economic transactions suggests that the same patterns of use and institutions governed the annual production cycle and use of pastures for centuries. As we begin to explore the countryside around Jaca, I am constantly struck by the juxtaposition of the ancient and modern, of continuity and change. On Friday, I looked out the window of our apartment complex on the edge of town just in time to see a flock of sheep being trailed past our swimming pool and green space towards one of the main roads through Jaca. Jaca itself has been inhabited since pre-Roman times and its cathedral dates from the 12 century. This small city for the most part gracefully blends the ancient monuments--the cathedral, a monastery, a roman bridge, and later military fortifications--with more modern architecture, and its economy depends significantly on tourism, not only from the nearby ski areas, but also the steady stream of pilgrims that follow the Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James), a time-honored religious pilgrimage route and now popular long-distance hike, from France to Santiago de Compostela in Northwest Spain.


This morning (Sunday) we took the local bus up the valley of the River Aragon to the ski area Astún to hike in the high country before the snow flies. I had thought that there would be a village at Astún, with the ski area built around an existing town, but this was not the case. The bus dropped us in the parking lot of the ski area and the only structures were the ticket booths and a hotel and shopping complex that appeared closed for the season. Our destination was the Ibón de Escalar, a glacial pond ringed by peaks that is only an hour’s hike from Astún. As we started up a gravel maintenance road on the ski slope, we looked up the mountainside to seek the source of a clanging and clamoring noise upslope. It was a large flock of sheep making their way over a pass into the Valley of Astún and spreading across the hillside as the sun began to light up the slope. The clanging were the bells on their necks and the clamoring the bleating. So here again was the coexistence of ancient and new livelihoods in this valley—pastoralism and ski tourism.

After a few switch-backs the road leveled for a while and crossed a small creek, and the trail became a footpath through the grasses and heather proceeding up the shoulder of a hill, crossing the creek again, and then zig-zagging up the side of the canyon. I had a brief moment of vertigo as the trail skirted some rock ledges on one side and a cliff dropped off on the other, but we edged past the tricky spot and continued walking up the steep grassy slope towards the peaks beyond. About 15 minutes later, we topped a small ridge and the Ibón lay below us, the outflow feeding the stream we followed up. Beyond the Ibón the trail continued on to a pass, the border with France, and more ambitious hikers had a choice of two peaks to bag from there—Pic de Moines (2347 meters), in France, or Pico de Astún (2287 m), in Spain—both walk-ups about an hour beyond the Ibón --but I had promised the kids an easy hike. We enjoyed taking photos of the peaks that circled us to the north and west, and the sea of dense mountain fog that lay caught between them, but below us, obscuring the view of the ski area and giving the illusion that we were aloft among the primeval peaks with only the sheep and some ponies grazing the slopes of Pic de Moines for company.

First Week in Jaca

We arrived in Jaca on the evening of September 1 after our flights from Denver to Philadelphia and on to Madrid, and an epic bus trip from Madrid to Huesca, which would not have been extraordinary, except for a 2 hour traffic jam and the fact that I was travelling with two tired and very hungry children and 8 pieces of baggage. My colleague Federico from the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (IPE) kindly met us at the bus station in Huesca and ferried us to our rented apartment in Jaca in the Institute’s covered pick-up truck. In the truck, we devoured the sandwiches which we were forbidden to consume on the bus from Zaragoza to Huesca, and made polite conversation with Federico as we drove through a light rain.


The first week in Jaca has been a predictable flurry of settling in and figuring out the routines of a new country and culture. Apart from the jet lag, there is the adjustment to the Spanish schedule (horario), with the main meal or comida in mid-afternoon (when everything closes for 2-3 hours) and a light supper late in the evening (9 or later). For a family used to rising at 5:30am, dining at 6, and lights-out for the kids at 8pm, this is a big change. There were the small details, like what do the other school children bring for their mid-morning snack (we switched to “bocadillos de jamon y queso”—ham and cheese on baguette--after the first day), and the bigger ones like how to get internet access (free WiFi in the public library and the town’s central park until I got connected to the IPE network) and where to buy groceries at a reasonable price and walking distance to our apartment.

One part of the horario that I particularly enjoy is the daily break for café at 11:30 am (to tide you over until comida at 14:30). Every day at about 11:30 a small herd of IPE researchers migrates to a bar across the main avenida and up a small back street for the mid-morning café. Who buys rotates daily and there is usually a friendly competition for who picks up the check each day (I finally managed pay on Friday). The coffee break lasts about 30 minutes, during which the researchers exchange information and institute gossip, complain about malfunctioning equipment (the IPE internet was down for 2 days this week), and engage in lively debates over topics such as whether it is unhealthy to nap in the shade of a walnut tree. (Apparently there is a local saying to this affect and one of the ecologists hypothesized that the purported unhealthy effects are due to the tanins from the tree leaves while another argued that sleeping in the shade causes one to catch cold.) Participating in this daily routine has helped me get to know my institute colleagues and also provides a natural forum for asking dumb foreigner questions without disrupting someone’s work.

Stay tuned

My sabbatical in Jaca, Spain begins on September 1, 2010.  I will be living in Jaca with my two children and conducting research at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology on Continuity, Change and Resilience in Pyrenean Pastoral Systems.  I plan to use this blog to keep students, colleagues, friends and other interested folks aprised of our adventures and discoveries.  I hope to share my fascination with human-livestock-landscape relationships across the centuries and the experience of embarking on a new collaborative relationship with herder communities in the central Pyrenees.