School of Sustainability

A Madrid mountain village keeps its sheep on foot

The shearing at Puebla de la Sierra does not start on time, and nobody minds. The slow morning leaves room for breakfast, for a go on Sergio's French carding machine, for improvising drop spindles out of dowelling rod and Marta's onions. Down by the stream, Juan García kneels in a knot of others, working a Rubia fleece into felt by hand. The day ends with music and dancing and food shared round; somewhere in it, roughly five hundred sheep and goats lose their wool.

This is the annual shearing festival of the Los Apisquillos Collective, formed twenty-six years ago in this village in La Sierra del Rincón, in the north-east of the Madrid mountains. The collective's flock is mostly Rubia de El Molar and Negra Castellana, two rare breeds native to the region. The animals give meat and dairy, but their other job is the land itself: grazing and trampling the mountain pasture and forest so it stays open. The collective exists to reinstate traditional rural practices and to stop the knowledge around them dying out.

The flock belongs to a much older arrangement. Spain's drove roads, the cañadas, were given official recognition by King Alfonso X in 1273, the same year the powerful shepherds' council of the Mesta was founded. For centuries after, shepherds walked their animals on foot between summer and winter grazing along what is now reckoned to be 125,000 kilometres of livestock trails. That seasonal movement, like the migration of wild herds elsewhere, shaped the landscape and maintained the ecosystems along the routes.

Most of that movement now happens in lorries. Depopulation, poor investment, cheap imports and physical obstructions have emptied the trails: scrub and forest have grown back spectacularly across Spain, and the cañadas that once worked as firebreaks have thickened into fuel. "Transhumance controls the overgrowth of scrubland", says Manuel Bahíllo of Trashumancia y Naturaleza, the organisation campaigning to keep the drove roads open as ecological corridors running the length of the peninsula. When the grazing stops, he argues, the biomass stays standing and waits for a spark.

So the woolly morning at Puebla is not nostalgia. The old routes carried livestock and cut firebreaks at once; now the hooves have gone and the fuel keeps accumulating. Javier, a farmer from Sanabria, puts it plainly: fires can be stopped, and a fire attacks more or less depending on the forest fuel it meets. García, Bahíllo, Sudlow and founder Álvaro are holding open a piece of working infrastructure, one flock and one festival at a time, on routes whose value is measured in what does not burn.

Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source