Picnics in the Ruins

Rural depopulation is part of the boom and bust cycle of the Pyrenees.  In my own study sites, the human population of one village has declined by 30% and the other by 60% over the past century.  Other, smaller, villages within each valley have experienced even greater population losses, or have been abandoned altogether.  History suggests that this is not the first such boom-bust cycle in the mountain population, but it may be more extreme than past cycles.  Other areas of Spain have experienced more dramatic population losses and rural abandonment in recent decades.  In this landscape history is layered century upon century as in the 21^st century forests overtake the terraced fields where farmers once grew wheat and later grazed their cattle, and hikers traverse the roman roads and gawk at Romanesque ruins, leaving our own middens of mandarin peels and pistachio hulls as one more layer in the sediment of time.  Some, perhaps most, of the abandoned villages will slowly fall away into piles of stones overgrown by native vegetation.  But others are being restored and re-inhabited.  Over the past few months we have visited a few of these works-in-progress, as well as sites that have been abandoned and not recovered.

One night in November, my 7-year old son and I ride in a friend’s car to a birthday party at a recently re-inhabited village on a hillside in the Pre-Pyrenees.  The trip takes an hour and the last stretch is up a frozen dirt road through a pine plantation that in warmer weather would be an impassable sea of mud.  We park at the edge of the village and make our way through the dark by the light of our cell phones, not having thought to bring flashlights.  We stop first at the communal bath house where we encounter some of the village residents who invite us to climb up a ladder to the attic and don costumes.  We follow our friends’ lead and decline the disguises—a decision I later regret—and stumble back into the night toward the communal kitchen and dining room.  Here we find a small herd of children aged 2-11, all in costume, painting their faces, and a similar number of scruffy-looking adults clad in creative get-ups related to the party theme—Rural Superheroes.  One caped man wears a metal necklace that on closer inspection turns out to be a chainsaw blade.  A woman who introduces herself, in character, as “Frost” appears to be a spider.  Another enormously pregnant woman bedecked with colorful tubes, hoses and miscellaneous plastic toys and household items later reveals herself to be the absent-minded “Super-mama.” My personal favorite, who arrives late to the party, is “Integrala” (loosely translated Whole-grain Woman) who sports oversized earrings fashioned from kitchen whisks and blows magic flour from the palm of her hand.  After snacks prepared in the communal kitchen the organized anarchy begins.  The birthday girl (a grown-up) decrees that each superhero must introduce him or herself and explain his/her super powers.  We clamber up the stairs to the open loft, which is a music rehearsal studio and communal dance and party space.  The first up is a man wearing briefs on the outside of his trousers, superman style, with a cape and mask.  I have forgotten his superhero name and powers, but his attempt at flying is unforgettable.  He stands on a chair in front of a pile of old mattresses and launches towards the audience with enthusiasm, flopping down onto the mattress pile.  Each superhero in turn mounts the chair, introduces herself, and leaps onto the heap of foam pads, beginning with the adults and ending with the children.  After this piece of theater is over, we adjourn for birthday cake and then reconvene for a round of charades, in which all the partygoers who want to play divide into two teams and must act out silly phrases drawn at random from a large jar, such as “Pirates of the Caribbean in the Orchard,” and the rest of us are the audience in hysterics.  The spirit is one of slightly self-deprecating irony combined with no-holds-barred fun.   The neo-rurals, as these pioneers are known, poke fun at their own earnestness and dedication, and act out to the hilt their non-conformist tendencies while performing the collective role of intentional community.  Not every member of the community is able to attend the party, but all who come play the game to the hilt and collaborate in this magnificent performance played by and mainly for themselves.  In the end, the only un-costumed partygoers are us—the stolid, square outsiders. 

We visit in the dark, but in the daytime these community members hurl equal energy into rebuilding, literally, the tumble down ruins of the old houses, cultivating gardens, tending the forest and a small herd of cattle.  Most do not have day jobs, although a few commute to nearby towns to work as teachers or as seasonal labor in the ski resorts.  The children attend school in a nearby village, helping to keep that school open by boosting its enrollment above the minimum threshold.  Most of the inhabitants come from urban backgrounds and most are well-educated, with university or graduate degrees.  They come lured by the ideals of a simple hands-on life, of free land and a home they can build themselves, and the appeal of living a communal lifestyle.  The inhabitants of this village have been rebuilding for about 6 years.  I end up hiring one of the men I meet at the party to transcribe my interviews with herders.  He turns out to be the fastest and most productive transcriptionist of the several local assistants I hire to help with my research, and I feel as though I am contributing to a worthy project, funneling some of my research funds into the local neo-rural subsistence economy. 

On New Year’s Eve we attend another party at a different recovered village site on another side of the same mountain.  Here, the residents have been rebuilding for 20 years, and the village now numbers 40 inhabitants and receives water and postal services from the government.  One of the inhabitants is a researcher at my host institute.  This visit, too, is after dark, but we take a flashlight tour of the village beneath the spangled winter sky.  Here is the restored church with a climbing wall where the altar once stood.  Later a pot-luck New Year’s feast will be laid out on the trestle table in the middle of the room.  Here is the irrigation water tank which doubles as a community swimming pool in the summer, and here is the orchard and garden it waters.  Here are the buildings, some restored in keeping with the architectural heritage of the region, others--not so much.   Many are still in progress with one or two stories built and another story to go.  We sit in the cozy kitchen of one of the homes and eat cheese with quince jam, and mushroom-stuffed crepes, mere appetizers before the feast to come.  It strikes me that there is a whole other research project here—a counter point to my current study on traditional knowledge and changes in the social networks in the ancient herding communities.  This is a story of renewal and regeneration against the backdrop of rural decay and decline.  But can these two stories intertwine?  Can the neo-rural urban escapees be part of the solution to rural depopulation and agricultural decline?  I do a quick internet search and discover that the two villages we visit may be part of a larger movement, much of it centered in this region of Spain, and that yes, at least one sociologist has conducted a comparative case study of some 40 recently re-populated villages. 

It is New Year’s Day and the snow is too shallow up high to make it worth the trip for skiing, so we drive our borrowed car a short way up the Rio Aragón Valley to visit another drainage renowned for its abandoned towns and ruins.  Here the abandonment seems to have been hastened by the government’s declaration of the area as a national hunting reserve and human repopulation does not seem to be encouraged.  The ruins here are accompanied by interpretive signs explaining the history of the crumbling walls.  At the first village we come to, we climb up a short trail to explore the remains of the Romanesque church.  Most of the roof is gone and the walls caved in, yet some of the original paint is still visible on the patches of remaining walls and ceiling, surprisingly bright blue.  The afternoon light on the stone gives it a golden hue and we delight in the delicate ferns sprouting from the cracks between the stones that formed the cupula of the chapel.  We eat our rustic picnic (cheese, salami, mandarins, almonds) sitting on another wall behind the church then continue our walk to the head of the valley where another, restored, monastery stands.  This simple Romanesque structure is graceful against the backdrop of the encroaching forest and distant snowy passes.  The capitals are intricately carved and there is a long and well-preserved text carved above the main door.  The building is closed but a piece of colored paper tacked to the door suggests that mass is still held here on some summer weekends. 

So these are our picnics in the ruins, some truly ruined, some restored, some rebuilt by young people creating a community from scratch, and some restored and preserved as historical monuments by government contractors.  To save the many waning rural agricultural communities in Spain, these villages will need to spawn their own rural superheroes, or perhaps, welcome in some wandering heroes from beyond their traditional boundaries to help inspire a new generation of innovators.