El Cadí: houses with a thousand-year-old chimney
In Labrador, the fireplace is the center of the house. For centuries, village inhabitants were counted by hearth: a smoky roof, a more or less extended family. That's how censuses were taken. So many homes, so many people. Fire control was humanity's first technological revolution. In the Cadí mountain range, there are houses with centuries-old, unbroken fireplaces: Cal Guardia de la Vansa, Cal Ribó de Artedó, Cal Vilanova de Vilanova de Banat... With lots of embers and ash. Albert Villaró notes it in Cadí [a biography] (Simbol Editors), a curious and tender book that awakens the rural ancestry within us all.
Albert lives in Estamariu and wakes up every day with the Cadí mountain in his eyes, rugged and imposing. Between October and May, one of his best moments of the day is lighting the wood stove: "It's a ritual: I sweep out the ashes, clean the glass, add branches of holm oak or juniper, or small puddles of dead pillows." The fire demands dedication and respect, hats of tightly stacked logs. Harmony and modesty.
Sheltered from the ancient fire, in Cadí there are more contemporary traditions, such as milk and smuggling. Milk trucks have been a state structure. "In every valley there was one, with which they would unload the cans at La Seu first thing in the morning" after visiting all the farmhouses and filling them with biscuits. In the 1990s, the famous aluminum containers gave way to tanks. The last mixed line, which carried milk and passengers between Tuixén and La Seu, with Horaci Botella at the wheel, made its final service in 2015. Now there's "la lechera," a publicly subsidized van driven by Laura, which picks up and drops off residents of the small villages in the Vansa Valley on demand.
The story of Cadí butter begins at the beginning of the 20th century. In a country devastated by phylloxera—yes, vineyards were grown in Urgellet and Cerdanya—Josep de Zulueta transformed a rather dry landscape into a little Switzerland, with meadows for harvesting, irrigation communities, and Swiss cows to milk and sell the milk to a cooperative. People uprooted the vines and began to live off the cattle. After decades, with EU milk quotas, small family farms became extinct. But the butter and the cooperative continue.
And the smuggling? It's been a discreet and complementary activity. "At home, we had a reference smuggler. He was Mr. Josep, a little man with bright eyes and a mischievous laugh who was from the Vansa Valley. He was the head of a gang. [...] He was a farmer, naturally, but he hadn't worked in a long time. Everyone knew he was a smuggler, and naturally, no one thinks... no one thinks he's in the Lleida prison." In 2015, former Interior Minister and former mayor of La Seu, Jordi Ausàs, also ended up in this prison for tobacco smuggling. He kept it in his garage. Did everyone know?
Milk, smuggling, or the street sale of turpentine and medicinal herbs... Life was hard, and you had to get smart. Many also emigrated to the city or to the Americas. Life in Cadí hasn't been easy. Hence the El Hierro character of the people, a defensive timidity: "We are orcs, fierce, and furry, in increasing order of intensity and takeoff." And politically, what? We'd say that in the human undergrowth lurks a kind of distrustful anarcho-Carlist ideology: a savage individual freedom and a deep-rooted traditionalism, or vice versa. I'm saying this, not Albert.
Where does the hardness of the people of Cadí come from? "When Our Lord passed through the Pyrenees, on the third day of Creation, his sack of rocks burst." From Queras. Hail country. "The fields, more than potatoes, produce stones." And yet, despite being a place of hidden solitude, it has been visited by everyone from the Romans to the Cathars. And Hannibal. And Picasso. In this refuge, a land of mists and mushrooms, and phenomenal botanical diversity, accordionists like Agustinet de Sisquer provide the melody on holidays, a music that the Tana (or Tramuntana?) wind makes resonate through forest paths, scree, canals, and fountains.