The dehesa and livestock of Valsalobre

The dehesa and the village

Around Valsalobre there was woodland, the dehesa (wood pasture), reserved for working animals: cattle and mules. Sheep were not allowed in. It was a luxury for the village, and the villagers cared for it: they fenced it, guarded it and celebrated it.

The arable fields were divided into areas, and the northern half was sown one year and the southern half the next. In spring, in May, the entire dehesa was enclosed to keep mules and cattle away from the wheat. If there was a portillo, a gap in a wall, it was blocked with thorn branches. Villagers cut them in the hills and a pair of mules dragged them to the spot, while others closed the gaps. There were named gates, such as La Huerta Vieja and Los Cajigares. Anyone bringing in livestock without permission risked being reported by the warden.

The mule keeper and the cowherd

Someone had to watch over the animals. Each year the job was put out to auction and went to whoever would do it for least. The mulero, the mule keeper, watched all the village’s mules; the cowherd, the cattle. Both were paid in wheat in September, according to each household’s animals: three celemines per cow, or half a fanega per pair of mules, the interviewees recall, without remembering clearly. Anyone with only one mule paid half. One villager tells with humour how a man with only a donkey said he should pay less, because donkeys and horses were the hardest to watch over.

In the morning, the mulero sounded a conch shell and people brought their mules to a set place. There were two conch shells, one for the cattle and another for the mules, and they sounded different. In the afternoon they returned to the dehesa, and in the morning they were hobbled so they could be caught. The morning meal was a piece of bread and perhaps a herring or a sardine.

It was children’s work. One villager says that at nine he watched the mules with his older brother, and another that at eleven he slept in a hut with the cowherds and cried bitterly when the mares escaped into the crops. Many boys left school to become shepherds at twelve, and one says he had no childhood.

The cerrada, a celebration

When the dehesa was enclosed, the village celebrated. Everyone came, cut thorn branches and brought them in. There was food, some drink and an «entrada de moros» (entrance of Moors) in the square: a villager known for being funny dressed up and entered riding his mule. Then there was dancing in the square. The next day everyone went out to clear the paths, because the mules would be passing along them with the wheat. Today, they say, some paths can no longer be walked.

The flocks, to Andalusia

Besides mules and cattle, Valsalobre had sheep. A 97-year-old villager remembers about seven thousand sheep, a thousand goats and more than a hundred mules and cattle, all with land cleared for cultivation. It was a lot of livestock; what there was not, he says, was as much scrub as now.

The small flocks, of three or four hundred sheep, and the large ones belonging to certain owners went down every winter to Andalusia or La Mancha. They returned in June. Summer grazing was paid for according to each village’s land. One shepherd remembers going down to Sierra Morena, along the vereda (a narrower drove road) and the Cañada Real (royal drove road), and one very bad winter: there was no food, the young were dying and every morning thirty or forty lambs were found dead. Another says his father took thirty days to reach Córdoba on foot with cattle and mules, while his mother stayed in the village, and by May there was no wheat left.

In summer, according to one shepherd, the livestock went up to the muela, a flat-topped limestone hill, above the source of the Cuervo. Another, who became a shepherd at twelve, says he kept his livestock a good hour’s walk from the village. Sheep were brought into the parideras, the pens in the countryside; one villager estimates there were ten or twelve in the municipality.

What happened afterwards

Over the years livestock numbers fell and people left the village; how it happened is told in When the telephone, electricity and running water arrived. The dehesa is still there, although, they say, only the memory of the enclosure celebration remains.