22 Dec 2008

Montoto

Meeting Vicky and Andy was the climax of the chain of events which started with the mail not being ready for us, and the subsequent trips into the Cordillera to kill time ‑ we had not planned to visit the mountains, expecting there to be snow and ice blocking our way. We stopped in the village of Soncillo to buy bread and milk; the storekeeper, on realising we are English, insist that we visit an English couple in the near­by hamlet of Montoto. He gives us detailed in­structions (in spanish) and is most adamant that we should go there. We decide we might as well try.

The instructions are easy to follow, and Montoto turns out to be a hamlet of a dozen or so farmhouses. We drive through it in a few seconds and stop for lunch at the side of a field. As we finish eating and are looking at birds in the field, I hear strange voices talking English. By chance the English couple have come out for a walk and taken the road we are parked on.We join them for the walk and later for coffee, discussing Britain and Spain and what we were all doing.

Vicky is Spanish but had spent the last nineteen years in London. Andy is from York­shire but also had spent some years in London. They had both been involved in social work, and event­ually got fed up of it.They had considered buying a flat in Barcelona, then one of Vicky's relatives had men­tioned cheap houses for sale in Montoto and so they changed their minds, bought a huge farmhouse and moved out to it in October. One wall of the house is believed to be at least a thousand years old, other bits having been added as required. The place had not been properly lived in for some years and it did not have much in the way of mod cons. Andy and Vicky put in a bathroom, got the kitchen stove working and organised a bedroom. They are working on the rest of the house as they have funds and time available, and may convert it into holiday flats.

The local bank manager asked if they would be interested in teaching English at the local pri­mary school, and they accepted on the basis that the three hours or so of teaching each week would help them to keep in contact with the local com­munity. The dozen or so students they expected turned into thirty-two of all ages and so far they have enjoyed it.

Andy is something of a spare time mechanic, and with his advice and tools we check the bat­tery and change the oil in the camper. Neither Jim or I have any interest in things mechanical. If a vehicle doesn't work, we call out the AA or its equivalent; Europe is a civilised enough place that we could get away with it. In more sparsely popul­ated areas people like us would soon come unstuck without being able to fix vehicles as and when necessary.Taking the battery out reveals a gaping hole in the metal it is sitting on and we may one day have found the battery falling out as we drove along. Again with Andy's help and advice, we make a tray from a bit of tin clipped from under the bonnet of an old abandoned car and get the battery bolted back in safely. We get quite a buzz of achievement out of it.

All this takes us two afternoons of half work­ing, half bird‑watching and half talking. We take them out for a meal, to a place they had recom­mended. The food and drink is cheap ‑ by British standards ‑ but good. It is a bit strange to have a bigger first course than second course but there is plenty of bread and wine to go with it all.

Twice we go with Vicky to the local diary farm for fresh milk. The farmer has about thirty cows, a mixture of a local breed, friesian types, and some white faced ones too. There is a vacuum pump but only one bucket and machine, so milking seems to be a mixture of machine and hand work. The farmer is horrified that, not only we had been milking 140 cows, but also that the British farmer got only 35 pesetas a litre when he gets nearer 45 pesetas. The scale and econ­omics of milk production are vastly dif­ferent here compared with Britain. Tuberculin testing had started only a few years ago with Spain joining the EEC, and some farmers were still resentful of having to slaughter infected cattle, even though they got reasonable compensation for the loss.

In fact the EEC is encouraging all sorts of profound and extensive changes to these mountain ecosystems. For example, in its bid to reduce milk production, it is giving grants for changing trad­itional livestock pastures into plantations of quick‑growing species such as monterrey pine and eucalyptus for short term profit.

However, this is not the first time that humans have imposed their will on the mountains. From Roman times until the Middle ages, the inhab­itants of the mountains deforested extensive areas, wher­ever the land was flat enough, to plough or provide fodder for their flocks. This brought about the disappear­ance of numerous spec­ies, e.g. red deer, wolf, bear and lynx, which became confined to the more inaccess­ible areas of the Pyrenees in the east or Galicia in the west. The ecosystem reached a new equilibrium, compris­ing subsistence level farming on the new fields, sustainable use of the remaining woodlands by local communities, and the rest of nature being allowed to get on with its own business more or less unmolested.

But another set of radical changes swept through the Cordillera as part of the process of recovery from the civil war in the 1950s. The subsequent economic development, especially in the 1960s, has brought about rapid and profound changes in social and economic structure. The industrial develop­ment east of Bilbao was an ob­vious example. And where industrialisation was not possible, tourism was being encouraged.

By visiting the area in the middle of winter, we saw little evidence of tourism, except for a small tourist office in Arenas de Cabra­les. However, the Autonomous Community of Asturi­as, in whose area lies the Picos de Europa, based its publicity for tourism on the slogan 'Asturias ‑ natural paradise' and has provided infrastruc­ture in the form of new roads, cable cars, moun­tain hotels, etc. The success of their policy was indicated by the several hundred thousand visitors now attracted to the area each summer.These changes are bringing alterations to the traditional ecosystems, and the animals and plants that live in them. Where farming has been aban­doned, the traditional flower-filled hay meadows are being taken over by rank grasses. The replac­ement of cattle and horses by sheep and goats deprives birds such as the chough of prey items (e.g. beetles) which colonise the faeces of the larger animals. The increase in ramblers and walkers is disturbing the breeding and feeding activ­ities of many animals. The sustain­able exploita­tion of fruit and berries by local people has become wholesale destruction as tourists and weekend visitors join the harvest. Litter and other rubbish has become a problem.

The local people are also becoming a threat to wildlife, in that changing their occupation from farming to service industries allows them more free time and money. They engage in outdoor activities, in particular, hunting has undergone considerable expansion in the last few years. The one and a half million hunting licences now issued in Spain (in Galicia one person in 25 has a hunt­ing licence) has resulted in the depletion of traditional hunting quarry and the subsequent persecution of species that were never considered to be cinegetic (quarry) species. Unfortunately the authorities show little interest in control­ling the situation. Hunting is, however, limited to two days a week, and we saw no signs of shoot­ing outside of those two days.The wildlife protection laws which do exist are administered by regional governments and their application varies widely. For example in Santan­der the Agricultural Council pays a ,100 bounty for each dead wolf; by contrast in Asturias (and in Andalucia in the south) wolves are protected and heavy fines are imposed on anyone shooting them ‑ in Asturias compensation is paid to shepherds who suffer losses assumed to be the result of attacks by bears or wolves. (Ref: Garcia Dory 1988)

On the Thursday we headed back to Laredo through pouring rain. Rivers were swollen and racing, and bird‑watching was impossible. We reached Laredo to find that the post office opened only the mornings, so we had to find a camping place and try yet again the next day. The mail arrived with that morning's delivery, and we continued our journey.

We followed the coast road, stopping a couple of times, but found only herring gulls and gannets out at sea. There were firecrests, tits and black-birds in the nearby vegetation and a pair of ravens in the top of a quarry behind us. One of these ravens indulged in aerial display ‑ closing its wings and turning onto its back, calling cluc­k‑cluck as it righted itself, and repeating the manoeuvre several times.

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