Sacred Sierra
Authors: Jason Webster
Contents
The Story of St Peter and the Fig Trees
September: Late figs; almond harvest; running with fire-ball bulls
October: Our first bees; mushroom picking; wild-boar hunters
The Story of Old Mother Misery and the Pear Tree
November: Dinosaur bones; truffle-tree planting; ‘purifying’ the land
The Story of the Charcoal-Burner’s Daughter
December: Olive harvest; mistletoe; a fight to the death
The Story of the Devil and the Carob Tree
January: Truffle market; the names of the winds; the Feast of San Antoni
The Story of the Knight Templar and the Moorish Girl
February: Almond blossom; the mysterious cave; how to lose a roof
March: Strange lights; more tree-planting; the valley of the curse
The Story of the Three Lemons of Love
April: Olive-tree pruning; the Pilgrimage of Les Useres; the secret rite
May: Gathering honey; cooking with snails; the coming of the rains
June: A part-time hermit; summer arrives; the night of San Juan
The Story of how the Rosemary Flower turned Blue
July: Iris-planting; making moonshine; a hidden tobacco field
The Story of the Three Pieces of Advice
August: The Tears of San Lorenzo; the ice-house; a forest fire
About the Book
This is a romantic, utterly alluring leap into Spanish sunshine, remote mountains and rural life. Jason Webster had lived in Spain for several years before he and his partner, the flamenco dancer Salud, decided to buy a deserted farmhouse clinging to the side of a steep valley in the eastern province of Castellón, near the sacred peak of Penaglosa. With help from local farmers – and from a twelfth-century Moorish book on gardening – Jason set about creating his dream. He had never farmed before, and knew nothing of plants, but slowly he and Salud cleared the land, planted and harvested their olives, raised the healing herbs they learned about from local people, set up bee-hives and nurtured precious, expensive truffles, the black gold of the region. And beyond all this they started to fulfil another vision, bringing the native trees back to the cliffs ravaged by fire.
At the same time they became drawn into the life of the valley: this is a book rich with characters as well as plants. It follows the people of the village from the winter rains to baking summer heat, from the flowering of the almond trees in spring to the hilarious, fiery festivals and ancient pilgrimages, and tells the history of the region through folk-songs and stories of the Cathar and Templar past. Jason and Salud lived through storms that destroyed their roof and fire that swept across their valley, but as the year passed and his farm flourished Jason found himself increasingly in tune with the ancient, mystical life of the sierra, a place that will haunt your imagination and raise your spirits, as it did his.
About the Author
Jason Webster was born near San Francisco and brought up in England and Germany. After spells in Italy and Egypt, he moved to Spain.
Duende: A Journey in Search of Flamenco
was described as ‘a great book’ by the
Guardian
and ‘mesmerising’ by the
Sunday Times
, while
Andalus: Unlocking the Secrets of Moorish Spain
and
Guerra: Living in the Shadows of the Spanish Civil War
were also critically acclaimed. He has appeared in several TV documentaries on Spain and written for the
Observer, Sunday Times, Guardian
and
New Statesman
. He lives in Spain with his wife, Salud, an actress and flamenco dancer from Valencia.
‘Highly readable … hugely informative … everyone’s dream of the good life without sentimentality or unrealistic expectations’
Country Life
‘Entertaining, accessible and sincere’
Rory MacLean,
Guardian
‘Webster offers both the humorous depictions of local traditions and idiosyncratic figures that we might expect, and a more searching Sebaldian perception of historical events that have shaped society’
Irish Times
‘Webster has the endearing writer’s knack of making us laugh and weep along with him … written in the sympathetic tradition of Chris Stewart’s best-selling
Driving Over Lemons
, but is even better’
Sunday Telegraph
‘If you’ve read any of Webster’s books on Spain you’ll know he has a natural empathy for the people and their culture. In
Sacred Sierra
he describes a year living in the rural heart of the country. He and his girlfriend bought a run-down farmhouse and tried to build the perfect retreat. They knew nothing about farming but, with a little local help, managed to cultivate olives, almonds and truffles. It was back-breaking work, but Webster makes it sound utterly seductive’
Mail on Sunday
A Salud, con todo mi amor
Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So … get on your way!
Dr Seuss
De medico, poeta y loco
todos tenemos un poco
.
‘we all have a bit of a doctor, poet
and madman in us.’
Spanish proverb
BEGINNING
The old farm was a mess. Some of the roofs had fallen in and thick brambles had taken over most of the garden. There was no electricity and the nearest water came from a spring a ten-minute walk away on the other side of a deep gorge. But a magnificent three-hundred-year-old oak tree shaded the front patio, while the south-facing view down the valley, with a whitewashed Spanish village perfectly framed in the distance, was the kind I had only dreamed of. There were more than a hundred almond trees and a small olive grove – enough to produce a few litres of oil.
I was no farmer and nor was Salud; both of us were more used to city life, and neither her life as a flamenco dancer nor mine as a writer had really prepared us for something like this. What would we do with forty acres of steep, rocky land? Crumbling dry-stone walls would need repairing; whole fields needed clearing of thick, prickly gorse and a dozen species of weed I couldn’t even identify. Could we really take this on?
I turned the question over in my mind as we headed slowly back to the house, convincing myself it was a crazy idea. The elderly farmer selling the place paused and looked up at a large outcrop of rock rising above us and I followed his gaze. Wild fig trees dotted its slopes, the orange and grey cliff-side reflecting the mellow light of the evening sun. Swallows were darting in and out of its crevices in search of insects, while ancient terraces climbed almost to the top, like steps, just visible behind a blanket of wild vegetation after years of neglect, then stopped where the slope had became too steep to build any more. It was a beautiful sight, multi-textured shadows lengthening across its craggy face.
‘The farmhouses where we’re standing are at seven hundred metres,’ the old man said. I did a quick calculation in my head: over two thousand feet. ‘
Eixa
,’ he went on, pointing up at the cliff with his gnarled walking stick, ‘
es la vostra muntanya
. That is your mountain.’
And suddenly the choice became no choice at all.
*
This is the tale of two mountains: one a sacred peak near the Spanish Mediterranean coast, a place of legends and stories, of ancient kings and popes, home to great pine and oak forests and the birthplace of life-giving rivers. And another much smaller mountain, a fold in the rock on the edge of the first, barely warranting a name, which became our home and the setting for a new life, and a garden that we slowly tried to cultivate around us. It is a tale of how we learned about the earth pressing between our fingers, both its workings and its mysteries, its dangers and the gifts it offered. And of how the mountain became part of our lives.
The original idea was simply to find a quiet bolthole in the country to do some writing. The city where we lived was hot and noisy: I wanted somewhere cooler in the hills to escape the suffocating summers on the coast.
Spain was at the centre of my life. After fifteen years living here I’d written three books about my experiences and exploration of it, from the dreamy pull of the Alhambra in Granada to the passion and other-worldly exoticism of flamenco. I’d fallen in love with Spanish food and wines, its music and art; the language, with its graphic, usually scatological swearwords, had penetrated deep into my psyche and become the common idiom of my dreams. Even the darker, crueller side had fascinated me, leading me to travel around the country investigating the deep wounds remaining from the civil war.