From a Hearth to a Cookstove
The United States has changed a lot in fifty years. However, Spain has changed in leaps and bounds, especially the villages. While small towns and villages in the United States probably had a good standard of life in the 1960's, with central heating in most homes, fresh milk and bread delivered daily or available at the local supermarket, fresh fruit even in winter, running water in most homes, that wasn't the case in Spain.
The other day, talking with my hostess at the pension in Santa Colomba de Somoza, she showed me the house (a typical Maragato farmhouse, restored and adapted), and she explained how they lived fifty years ago. She showed me what had been the original kitchen. The uneven stone floor was the original, including the hearth. The floor stone was slate, but the hearth consisted of a round stone resistant to heat, raised less than a hands breadth, where there were ashes from the last fire lit there. That was where meals were originally cooked. There was a beehive oven in the corner, still in use today. There was no chimney. The smoke accumulated near the ceiling, where the hams and sausages would be hung, curing them.
Behind the kitchen were the granaries, and on the floor above, the bedrooms. On the other side of the patio were the stables where the mules, horses, and farm animals were kept. Water was pulled up from a well and the only heating in winter was the fire in the kitchen. I explained to her that in Galician villages it was similar once upon a time, only our farm animals tended to be housed on the lower floor, next to the kitchen and underneath the bedrooms. And our hearth was higher, like a low stone seat, though in the province of Lugo it was closer to the floor.
But, though it sounds like something from the nineteenth century, that was the way people lived in rural villages and towns only fifty years ago. Or closer in time, even. When my husband was small, before his family built a newer house, he lived in a house without running water, with the cows looking into the kitchen, contemplating the family meals. In the mornings he would have to go to the spring next to his house to wash before walking to school with his older brother. At that same time I was living in a decent little three-room apartment in Boston's North End, with indoor toilet, running water, cookstove, and central heating. Except for technology, I was living a childhood much like our daughter has lived.
Even food and eating habits have changed enormously. Fifty years ago people ate what they had in their kitchen garden. Fresh fruit wasn't sold in the scattered, tiny grocery stores. It was picked in the family orchard within season. There was no way you could eat strawberries in January. Mostly, what was sold was a few canned goods, generally sardines and tuna, sodas, and cooking oil, apart from the occasional cleaning product when the Lagarto soap wouldn't do (Lagarto soap is similar to Marseille soap, and was used for everything.) Now you can find out of season fruits and vegetables flown in from the Southern Hemisphere, and strawberries from the south of Spain grown in greenhouses in January.
As a society we have quickly forgotten our recent past. Most tourists from large cities, when shown what I was shown in Santa Columba, gasp and look around in awe, unaware that some of their parents lived in similar conditions during their childhoods. Change in rural areas has been brutal. Apart from modernization in houses and farming practices, people have left for the cities. Some of the villages I passed through on my trip were dying or dead. In fifty years Santa Columba, which once had just over a thousand inhabitants, has lost around six hundred souls. Abandoned houses and crumbling walls stand as testament to the bleeding. Where we live on the Galician coast there are few abandoned houses, with many new ones sprouting up in the past twenty years. But inland it's another story. Whole villages are up for sale. Whoever wants to pay some good money can buy desolate houses and random, scattered stones with broken dreams.
The other day, talking with my hostess at the pension in Santa Colomba de Somoza, she showed me the house (a typical Maragato farmhouse, restored and adapted), and she explained how they lived fifty years ago. She showed me what had been the original kitchen. The uneven stone floor was the original, including the hearth. The floor stone was slate, but the hearth consisted of a round stone resistant to heat, raised less than a hands breadth, where there were ashes from the last fire lit there. That was where meals were originally cooked. There was a beehive oven in the corner, still in use today. There was no chimney. The smoke accumulated near the ceiling, where the hams and sausages would be hung, curing them.
Behind the kitchen were the granaries, and on the floor above, the bedrooms. On the other side of the patio were the stables where the mules, horses, and farm animals were kept. Water was pulled up from a well and the only heating in winter was the fire in the kitchen. I explained to her that in Galician villages it was similar once upon a time, only our farm animals tended to be housed on the lower floor, next to the kitchen and underneath the bedrooms. And our hearth was higher, like a low stone seat, though in the province of Lugo it was closer to the floor.
But, though it sounds like something from the nineteenth century, that was the way people lived in rural villages and towns only fifty years ago. Or closer in time, even. When my husband was small, before his family built a newer house, he lived in a house without running water, with the cows looking into the kitchen, contemplating the family meals. In the mornings he would have to go to the spring next to his house to wash before walking to school with his older brother. At that same time I was living in a decent little three-room apartment in Boston's North End, with indoor toilet, running water, cookstove, and central heating. Except for technology, I was living a childhood much like our daughter has lived.
Even food and eating habits have changed enormously. Fifty years ago people ate what they had in their kitchen garden. Fresh fruit wasn't sold in the scattered, tiny grocery stores. It was picked in the family orchard within season. There was no way you could eat strawberries in January. Mostly, what was sold was a few canned goods, generally sardines and tuna, sodas, and cooking oil, apart from the occasional cleaning product when the Lagarto soap wouldn't do (Lagarto soap is similar to Marseille soap, and was used for everything.) Now you can find out of season fruits and vegetables flown in from the Southern Hemisphere, and strawberries from the south of Spain grown in greenhouses in January.
As a society we have quickly forgotten our recent past. Most tourists from large cities, when shown what I was shown in Santa Columba, gasp and look around in awe, unaware that some of their parents lived in similar conditions during their childhoods. Change in rural areas has been brutal. Apart from modernization in houses and farming practices, people have left for the cities. Some of the villages I passed through on my trip were dying or dead. In fifty years Santa Columba, which once had just over a thousand inhabitants, has lost around six hundred souls. Abandoned houses and crumbling walls stand as testament to the bleeding. Where we live on the Galician coast there are few abandoned houses, with many new ones sprouting up in the past twenty years. But inland it's another story. Whole villages are up for sale. Whoever wants to pay some good money can buy desolate houses and random, scattered stones with broken dreams.
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