Tuesday 24 October 2017

The Pied Pipers of Punxeiro

I was warned, when I bought our tickets for the Festa da Vendima at the ironmongers from where they're sold, "Cuidado, eh." Be careful - an Ingles at Punxeiro's annual harvest festival? Did I know what I was letting myself in for?

This is pretty standard ribbing, of course, but later, when another friend told me that he no longer goes because it's a little bit full on, I confess I did wonder what was coming. Punxeiro is a very small village higher up the mountains. So small that, much like Castiñeira of an earlier entry, no shop or even bar is in evidence. (It's possible I simply missed them in the revelry described below, of course. But I don't think so.)

Now my memory of harvest festivals doesn't go beyond those dull affairs at school where you had to bring in some non-perishable food item, which would be gathered together in some kind of display at the front of assembly, later to be distributed to some undefined and, to my childish brain mysterious, deserving and needy recipients. This was not that.

You're picked up, if you're going from Viana, by a free bus which drives you the twenty minutes or so uphill to the starting point, at which your ticket is exchanged for a neck tie and a small ceramic cup;


These are yours to keep, and you can immediately discern the regulars at this affair, as they quickly tie the two together through the cup handle and then round their necks, so they're wearing the cup as a sort of pendant. Only a stupid English person would put the neck tie on but keep the cup in hand all night because he's too worried he won't tie it well enough and it'll drop to the floor, breaking and curtailing the evening's drinking. (I'd argue though that the above photo is triumphant validation of my approach, but all the other cups seem to have reached people's homes undamaged anyway.)

'Never mind the cup. How are you supposed to spend the evening drinking in a village with no bars?' I'm glad you asked. A lack of bars has not stopped the generous inhabitants of Punxeiro putting on a hell of a party by opening their bodegas. The bodega is a typical feature of many Spanish homes. A sort of designated entertaining space, often below the house but occasionally on the ground floor, they usually include a large dining table, storage for wine and space to cure meats, and often feature a fireplace to do a bit of open-flame cooking.

How do you find them in the dark? You follow the band. Known as charangas, these are usually groups of locals who'll act as guides for the evening. They strike up a tune and lead you, behind a sort of wheel cart light show, to the next bodega to open. People, filling the narrow streets of the village so thickly that it can become impassable if you happen to want to go against the tide, follow happily behind it and wait for the doors to open.

When they do, out comes apparently unlimited supplies of wine and tapas of myriad variety. The locals work their way through the throng with large jugs of red in one hand, white in the other, followed by tray after tray of tapas of every kind, both savoury and sweet. It comes in no particular order so you find yourself eating chorizo followed by chocolate brownie followed by favada followed by rice pudding, and so on in little mouthfuls. They move through the densely packed crowds, hundreds of arms reaching over them, round them, across them to pick at the trays like so many octopuses (octopi? octopodes?) which have somehow managed to live past market day. It seems impossible that there would be enough for so many people.

It now becomes clear, though, why I was warned when I bought the tickets. The little cups hanging from everybody's neck ties are refilled constantly, so you have no idea how much you've drunk. The wine, to be charitable, isn't the finest stuff - it's all home-made and very young. But what it lacks in quality, they make up for with generosity. The wine, and the food, just keep coming.

Eventually the bodega runs dry of both, the band strikes up and moves on to the next one, followed by the increasingly 'cheerful' throng, and the next bodega repeats the process. And so on. Locals, clearly identifiable in bright yellow T-shirts, run hither and thither keeping things as organised as they ever can be at such things in Spain. The ironmonger who sold me the tickets must have run past me at least three times himself. I think there were about half a dozen stops during the whole thing, but can't clearly remember, as this mobile shindig made its way round the village towards the after-party at the end.

This comprises two large stages set up in a clearing after the last bodega. It's a considerably larger affair than the three-in-a-van party at Castiñeiro. The first band Los Player's, twelve artistes dressed like a cult of Butlins red-coat worshipers, boasted a giant, dazzling light show to go with their wildly superfluous apostrophe. We sat and watched them for half an hour or so, and then headed home. Way, way too many people for the bus, so we walked down an unlit track, through pitch-black countryside, only mobile phone lights, drunks and mysterious noises from left and right to accompany us. At one point a fellow shambled out of the dark going uphill, against all logic, looking for all the world like a zombie as he appeared in our little pool of light for just a few moments, lumbering past us towards a piss-up he was extremely late for with no light whatsoever to show him the way.

Good people of Punxeiro, I'll be back next year - it was a blast. I'll bring a few beers, though, as do some of the more experienced visitors, because it's entirely absent. Oh and I'l be tying that cup around my neck in the approved manner so I don't look like quite such a bewildered newbie.





Friday 20 October 2017

After the flames

We''ve just driven back, this time in daylight, through the area that was ablaze in the early hours of Monday morning, pictured in my previous entry. We, and our village, have been fortunate - the flames stopped a couple of miles short of us. Others, including friends of ours, have not been so lucky, losing crops which represent their livelihoods to the fire.

The mountainsides are charred black and smell, still, of smoke. It's an appalling sight and a heartbreaking one, to see what should be green and verdant beauty reduced to ashes as it is. The national news screens have been filled with images of burning forests and farms, Galicians weeping at having lost everything to the flames. Four people are dead. Portugal has had it even worse, with almost 40 people killed there. It's been a very difficult week and, understandably, despair is giving way to anger. Anger at the people who started fires deliberately - there have been arrests already. Anger too at what's perceived to be a passive, reactive rather than preventative fire policy from the Galician government. Certainly it's true that, driving back home today, freshly cut fire breaks were evident in the forests which cover the landscape - too late when the flames have already been and gone in so many places. It seems also that more than 900 of the firemen who stand ready during the long, dry summer months were stood down in very early October, despite the clear and ongoing threat.

It's simply too much of a coincidence for me that, with desperately needed rain finally coming on Monday night, more than 100 fires were active in Galicia that same day. Yes, it's entirely possible that it was the consequence of so little rain for so long, but 105 separate fires just hours before that rain finally fell, all over the region? I know nature can appear cruel but it's quite clear here that people, always capable of infinitely more cruelty, calculated as it is, have fanned nature's own flames here.

The areas around our town which burned in the fires of two years ago are now patchworks of green and black. Bushes and grasses are hiding the black scars of previous fires. Plant life recovers quickly, of course, and those areas will, if they're allowed to, recover eventually. The trees, though - they're gone. It's going to take a very long time for them to come back properly - too long for many of the residents here to live to see it.

I sincerely hope that anybody who is proven to have started any of these fires is given a very long time to think on what they've done.

Monday 16 October 2017

Burning pain

It’s a deeply troubling feeling to wake up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. That’s what happened in the early hours of this morning, though, in our house. The unmistakable smell of burning filled the house, and for a few moments we wondered if our home was on fire.

It turned out, though, that it was Galicia itself which is burning. The whole village, dark as it was, was wreathed in a smoky haze. Two minutes outside and our hair and clothes stank of smoke. There are already forest fires all over the area - the city of Vigo in particular being aflame in spectacular and horrifying manner, but the one we passed through this morning is the closest yet to our home. 

We had to get up at 5am anyway, to make the journey to Valladolid. It’s just as well we did, because the first part of the drive we were greeted by these scenes, and not more than half an hour after we passed, the road had to be closed as the flames reached the very edge of the road itself.















These images give an idea of what we drove through this morning, and it's got much worse since. As I type, we’re all too aware that the fire is growing, and getting ever closer to our home village. Already it threatens a smaller pueblo a short distance away, and we’re feeling anxious, though we ourselves are not there. 

One really troubling thing about these fires is that they’re so widely agreed to have been set, at least in some cases, deliberately. Of course the two-year drought that Galicia is currently suffering has a lot to do with it, but the region’s government has openly stated that their ‘principal hypothesis’ is that the fires are man-made, the starting sites chosen carefully. The reasons for this are so clouded in gossip and speculation that it’s difficult to see clearly what the truth may be, but certainly a similar case in Italy resulted in the arrest of six firefighters recently. It was so widely believed to be the case anyway, before any such comment was made official, that this is one of those things that’s become fact in the retelling, whether it’s correct or not. I’ve certainly heard it said by plenty of people in the last few months anyway.

The map of where the fires are in Galicia right now shows the scale of the task facing a firefighting force depleted, according to members of that same force, by cuts and stretched by the widespread nature of the problem. There simply aren’t enough men, aren’t enough fire trucks, aren’t enough helicopters and isn’t enough water to fight them effectively. (We’ve just heard, for example, that the effort to combat ‘our’ fire has been opened to anybody who feels able to give them a hand. Can you imagine that in Britain?)

Galicia, usually so green and beautiful, is becoming a charred ruin of its former self. There is, after months without a drop of it, rain forecast for tonight and the next few days. It’s come too late to help many people already. We can only hope it comes soon enough to help Viana.