Since the beginning of February my family and I have been in the Alpujarra; south side of the Sierra Nevada in Spain. We are here to experience the rough side of life: being a farmer in a tough arid land. We are trying to get a glimpse of the other side of the food story and feel what it is like to work the land (mainly by hand labour); and give our brain a bit of a rest. But despite the huge amount of physical work we do each day, the mind doesn’t rest. There is just too much going on here: the shrinking and greying villages, the contrast between coastal and hill-side farmers, the young versus the old, the ‘extranjeros’  vs the locals, fighting bush fires vs keeping a varied landscape, organic farmers selling mainstream to the world market, etc etc… I will start by telling you a bit about the village structure here, in Yegen.

Yegen is a small, typical white Moorish village in the centre of the Alpujarra. It seems just another village, but it is bit more special than all the other white towns. A certain Gerald Brenan (a British self-appointed anthropologist) was already fascinated by the life and customs in this village more than 90 years ago. He experienced Yegen as rather backwards (a way of life that he couldn’t imagine still existed) while at the same time the villagers as being extremely open to new comers. He ended up living in Yegen for about 30 years and produced a very popular book. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to get a hold of a copy but I did discover a 45 minute documentary about Gerald Brenan’s return to the village in 1974 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAAYPVsQQ4). Interestingly enough, he talks about the huge progress of the village and the change in customs and traditions, whereas to me – born in the late 1970s – it seems to be a pre-War setting. I couldn’t believe it was actually 1974; the streets were huge irregular stones mixed with sand on which only mules were to be seen, the women washed their clothes in a river, no motorised traffic at all. At the same time, Continue reading →