The hills provide a living: resin, firewood, lavender and asphodels

Resin

A villager who as a child took food to his resin-tapper father tells it this way: his father spent more than thirty years extracting resin from the pines of the dehesa (wood pasture). There were five resin tappers in Valsalobre. One worked three thousand five hundred pines, another three thousand and another two thousand, and each man’s trees were sometimes close together and sometimes scattered, which meant some collected more resin than others.

Between March and April the bark was stripped from the pine. A half-moon piece of metal was hammered in with a mallet and a casco, an earthenware pot made in Priego, was placed below to collect resin when the pine «sudaba» (sweated). When the pots filled it was time to remasar, to collect the resin: a paddle was used to put it into a metal tin and from the tin into a wooden vat, like those used for wine. Payment was by the vat. A man who collected it says it was the best-paid work he ever did. He thinks the resin works that bought it, a very important company in the 1950s and 1960s, was in Cañizares, though he is not certain.

According to them, the pine that yielded most resin was the maritime pine; Scots pine was never tapped. For the child bringing food, the broth almost always arrived spilt from the basket swinging so much, and he went round the dehesa for fear of the cattle.

Firewood, by lot

Oak firewood was cut communally. The whole village carried out pruning, and the wood was piled in rimeros, heaps later allocated among families by lot. Sometimes an oak was so large it went to two or three villagers, and the pieces were numbered. Dead Portuguese oaks were also allocated by lot. In the past the upper branches were distributed and the overhanging side branches left; now, they say, it is the other way round.

That same timber drove the village economy. One man explains that the town council always lived from pine felling: when timber brought money, there was no need to worry about paying for anything. Today, with timber worth almost nothing, the council has no resources. A man who felled a Scots pine about twenty-one metres tall remembers it yielding seven cubic metres and being bought by a carpenter. Beside it stands another, called «el abuelo» (the grandfather), which villagers say is still standing in the dehesa.

Lavender

For many households, espliego, lavender, was the best income of the year. Gathering was banned until the appointed date, and it was cut in late August or early September, after threshing was finished. People brought it to a scale and were paid by the arroba. One man says his household lived on it for half a year. Two shepherds shared the work: one stayed with the sheep and the other cut the lavender and carried it back on his shoulder, and that money paid for the festivities.

Lavender was distilled in a boiler beside the river, near a small bridge at the entrance to the village. Children helped tread it down, jumping on it to pack it, and a very small quantity of essential oil came from the boiler. Women also went to cut it. One woman remembers her harvest being rounded up to four arrobas when weighed because it fell only a little short. It was not sown in the Serranía: it grew on the hillsides.

Asphodels, acorns and mushrooms

Gathering gamones, asphodels, was banned all year except on one appointed day. Villagers remember the competition: some people went to sleep nearby the night before to be first, and everyone had their spot. They were gathered before dawn because later, in the sun, they could no longer be gathered as well, and were boiled with pumpkin, potatoes and bran for pigs. Portuguese-oak acorns were subject to the same ban and were gathered on another appointed day.

Mushrooms did not then have the reputation they have now. People gathered saffron milkcaps, field mushrooms and king oyster mushrooms. One man remembers loading a mule with a pannier full of saffron milkcaps, which they call «mízclos» (saffron milkcaps), and going to Cañamares to exchange them for a load of grapes, more or less kilo for kilo. Valsalobre had no vineyards.

What they say about abandonment

Villagers link abandonment of the hills to fires. One stockbreeder explains it this way: when there was livestock, the ground was clear and lightning strikes nearby did not start fires; now, without animals, dry grass burns from a cigarette end. According to him, Patrimonio Forestal put so many obstacles in his way that he ended up selling his livestock. This is one person’s testimony and has not been checked, so it is recorded among the unresolved questions.