Hitting the North Coast

My stay in Leon was brief, I had long distances to cover to get here and to move on and reach the area known as Cantabria. The Parador in Leon is the largest I have stayed in, yes; the building in the photograph is the hotel. One of the reasons I wanted to come here was because I would coincide with a craft fair. It was a good opportunity to meet several makers at once from different areas of the region. There is a real mixture of standards and traditional crafts sit uncomfortably next to contemporary ones, with very little fusion between the two. A large percent of makers are what I would describe as hippies of the 80s - I don't mean this in a derogative way. In a lot of cases, it is thanks to them that some of these crafts are surviving.

I left early the next day excited to head in to the mountains and, I was rewarded with some great views. On the way down to the coast I had to take some nail-biting bends ... and it began to rain very hard and then there was hail... all quite exciting.

The landscape has changed dramatically from hot and flat to green and lush. This is a Spain I do not know and I was looking forward to arriving at Santillana del Mar, where I was going to stay for two nights. The buildings are made of a soft yellow stone and there are wooden verandas. I arrived at another feria!! The village was full of children and they where being chased by these giants who would run after them beating them with brooms. They where also letting off a lot of firecrackers and everyone was having a great time. When that came to an end the music started and the BBQ was ready - free food and beer - all paid be the local council.


My mother says that maybe paying for Spaniards to have a good time keeps the national health costs down!

Santillana is very picturesque, but it relies heavily on tourism. I looked for local crafts but did not like anything I saw except some pottery, which ironically, when I asked the potter where he got the style from he told me that he had seen it in England! I bought a piece as my souvenir of this place.
I did make a trip to Comillas a town further down the coast. To spend a few hours on the beach and have some lunch. There where lots of people out enjoying the sunshine and there was a triathlon going on.


I sat in a bar overlooking the whole bay and ate baby cuttle fish and croquets and drank a pineapple juice, while I watched fit men running down the beach to do a long swim in the cold sea.

Oh, Comillas also has a building designed by Gaudi, it is called 'El Capricho' and you can enjoy eating there, it is now a posh restaurant. I preferred Comillas to Santillana, it was real, were as the village I was staying at felt like a theme park.


After resting and catching up with work, I was moving on to Gijon and then to Galicia.

Zamora and its Outskirts

When I got to Zamora I found out that they are celebrating a Feria. Ferias happen all over Spain because every village, town and city has a patron, or Saint watching over everyone. So, once a year you have to give thanks and celebrate!

I arrived on Wednesday evening and the party would start at noon the next day, so I had one morning to find and interview a craftsman. I headed for the Tourist Information Office and explained what I was after. There was a guy there who was just visiting the office, he turned out to work for the local government and also happened to be a sculptor. He offered to introduce me to a couple of people and then proceeded to give me a guided tour of the town. Zamora turns out to have over 20 Romanesque churches and it is also the place where El Cid came from.

The Parador I was staying at was an amazing building; sometimes they are one of the most important buildings in the area and worth a visit even if you are not staying in them.

The following morning I headed to a woodcarving workshop run by Jose Perez and his father. Jose is only 36, he finished a 5-year course in Salamanca and was teaching others by the time he was 20. He learnt the trade from his father and between them do all the large commissions in the area. With so many religious institutions around, 90% of their work is either restoring or making wooden floats that are carried around the village at Easter times. These things are enormous! In Zamora there is a museum dedicated to them.
Sadly Jose was handing out end of term grades that morning, so I spoke to his father, who also had a pair of students in the workshop doing an internship. Here you can see him cutting out a design and on the right you can see some panels Jose has carved for a door. They also, from time to time, make pieces of furniture or mirrors for clients, but they have enough work for the next three years!
I was impressed with the quality, but it was obvious that this workshop is healthy and busy because of the unique circumstances it finds itself in. I did ask if they had been involved in the restoration of an important crib in a nearby village and Miguel said no, some restorers from Madrid had be involved with that project.



The course Jose took in Salamanca has now been shortened to 3 years.

Another craft in Zamora, which I have not seen anywhere else is papier mache dolls. Apparently a couple make them and since leaving Zamora I have also seen them in Leon, so they must be doing well, but I find them a bit creepy. I took this image of them in a store and they have an 'retro' feel about them, that is perhaps appealing to people.


Instead I went to the Museum of Ethnology - which I highly recommend. It is only 4 years old and sponsored by 'Caja de Espana', a large Spanish bank. There are three floor and each concentrates on a theme. The top floor was all about clay, used in buildings and pottery. The second was all about traditional customs and the first was about home life and artifacts. On my visit the museum also had an exhibition of sculpture by a modern artist. His pieces where displayed among the permanent collection and where directly linked with the permanent collection. It was the first time they had done this and I intend to speak to the Director to ask him how it has been received.

I said good buy to Zamora and made another detour for a tiny village west of where I was meant to be heading. The lady at the tourist information office told me that the traditional costumes of this region of Extremadura where made in 'Calbajares de Alba'. When I got there I thought there was no way there could be a workshop of any kind in this dusty village in the middle of nowhere! I asked the attendant at the petrol station and was told that that did not exist anymore, but just as I was about to get into my car, she said 'wait lets ask the village idiot' - I swear that is what she said! Anyway, this poor individual was walking along the other side of the road and came over when called, she said yes there where still some ladies working at the workshop, so I went looking for them. I found them; Maria Jesus and Mercedes, and boy was I in for a treat!











The work is so labour intensive that it takes 5 women 5 months to produce a skirt. It is a one-off and will cost about 1,300 euros. These skirts are used on special occasions and handed down in the family. The building was build in the 60s to support the future of this craft. However, there are only 5 ladies left and they are all retired, three of them currently not working because of family responsibilities or ill health. They can´t see a future and have no one to teach. I think the location is a big factor, but I came away passionately wanting to save this craft if I can.
You can learn more about the town on the following website - all in Spanish of course...
Calbajares de Alba (Zamora) www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/6344/PRINCIPAL.HTM
you have to look up "Traje Carbajalino" on the left hand side.

I have not put the best pictures in - you will have to come to the exhibition of photographs I will put up at the Guild when I return.

Like the bullfighting costumes, the skills needed to keep this traditions alive, have to be used in a modern context or they will disappear, and when you think that rich people are quite willing to spend 3 to 5 thousand pounds on a mass produced handbag or watch, you have to wonder where the logic lies?...

Apart from the influence of marketing, of course.

It doesn't help that I was told by Maria Jesus that she did not want me to photograph some of the pieces and that she did not want more work, she was too old to teach and just saw it as a hobby. Mercedes, who is more active and sees the importance of what they are doing, explained that unless there was a regular income for the 5 ladies, you could not expect them to continue or show interest in passing their skills on. You can´t make a living out of it.

I said good buy with the sun going down and leaving a trail of red dust on the road.

Extremadura is so rich in crafts and manual skills, but feels like the third world, maybe that is why they still exist? I wonder how the recession will effect them, so far I have seen little evidence.

On the way to Salamanca

Leaving Plasencia in the middle of the afternoon meant I had plenty of time to roam the countryside before arriving at my next Parador. On impulse I had bought a postcard a few days earlier of one of the largest Roman bridges in Europe. It happened to be quite near by, (well, more like an hour's detour), so I decided to go and see it as well as stop in a village where another well-respected potter lived.

He is the last to use a technique of encrusting designs into the pots. Even more interesting to me was the fact that he prepared his own clay, he knew where to find it, calculate it's quality and vary the heat accordingly. Apparently this region has some of the best clay in the world in terms of resisting high temperatures.

I enjoyed driving in this very rural and pretty barren part of Spain. When I got to the bridge, I was very impressed that it is still in use 2007 years after it was built.

What are so amazing are the extremes you find within an hours drive of Palencia. To the west is a valley where the best cherries in Spain grow, throughout most of the summer; they are the size of small plums! In the Jewish town of Hervás, we saw people selling things from their allotments, such as these wonderful yellow string beans; I thought they hadn't seen the light. Hervás' was a medieval Jewish town. Its narrow, steep streets are lined with houses made with adobe and chestnut-wood frameworks, their roofs plastered with Arab tiles to shield the wind. The whole community was evicted during the inquisition apart from those who were willing to convert to Christianity.

Only a short drive away is the national park of 'Monfrague', famous for its vultures and eagles. This is wild and arid looking land and you can imagine a cowboy ride up through the mid day haze at any minute. Houses are built of flint stone and shade is only found in man-made structures.

Lucky for me, my family took me to a natural watering hole where the locals cool off. We sat by the river, watching adults behave like children and I tasted the local cheese called CASADA - sort of like a fondue thing, which you just mop up with bread.
On the way to Salamanca I stoped at a village called 'Banos de Montemayor', where I had been told I would find people working with whicker. I was too late, the last of them had retired a couple of years ago and had opened a shop selling whicker-ware from china, the shop was called "Shanghai".
I got to Salamanca late, my hotel was just on the other side of the river and I could not believe the view when I pulled back the curtains.
I thought I would list some web-links on the people I have seen. However, there is really very little I can show. To get a taste of how behind the craft industry is in promoting itself have a look at this video which I found on the local press web-page: http://www.extremaduraaldia.tv/index.php?option=com_seyret&Itemid=&task=videodirectlink&id=3155

Zafra, Merida y Trujillo

I have now left Andalusia behind and am in the land of the Conquistadors.

Cordoba to Merida is a long drive, so I stopped at a town called Zara, not knowing anything about it, I was charmed by the lovely main square and I even found a potter who told me how there used to be a whole bunch of potteries, but he was the last. I bought the bowl on the left, oops.

Walking passed a half opened door, I looked in and saw this entrance hall. The Arab influence is still very evident in these parts. They say that the province of Extremadura is like this up until Merida and then it changes quite abruptly. I will let you know.

The potter also showed me these drinking vessels and said young people no longer used them and that really people only bought them for sentimental reasons or because the tourists thought they where quaint. I like the pattern on them, made simply by rubbing a stone over the damp surface of the clay.

In Merida I walked by the market, still busy at 12 noon. It was incredibly hot and I made a mad visit to the Roman theatre, but had it to myself.

After a lunch of chickpea soup followed by grilled fish and salad, finished with a small flan and a coffee I had to take a nap like everyone else.

Merida is famous for its Roman ruins and is very modern museum, built by a famous Spanish architect called 'Maneo'. The building is fantastic and the collection has some pretty amazing things in it too, unfortunately the website is not very helpful.

In 1998 the province of Extemadura began awarding one person the title of 'Master craftsman' every two year. Luckily for me the six men named Masters since then where exhibiting their work for the first time at a show in Merida. I arranged to interview one of them, Lorenzo Vinagre at his work-shop on the outskirt of the town.

He and his brother have a shop in town. Lorenzo is the 'craftsman' and his brother Juanma is the 'businessman'. Like so many craftsmen in Spain he learned his craft at home. He can produce all the traditional, functional items people used to use, but also has his own contemporary take on them and is now working on commission with architects, doing murals in hotels and bars. To supplement his income he makes reproductions of roman clay objects that are sold at the museum, with the help of mentally disabled men he knows from working at the local asylum.

Again, I was told that traditional objects did not sell, where not used... so it was rather satisfying to see a drinking vessel (called a "botín" in Spanish) being used quite a lot at the local breakfast haunt in Trujillo. The thick clay keeps the water cool and the object is far more attractive than any plastic bottle.

I was there stuffing my face with churros again. Trujillo is magical, there is something slightly oppressive about it, with all the stone and churches built with the money the conquistadors brought back from the new world. This is the birthplace of Pissarro, the most famous of the Spanish adventurers and also one of the most ruthless.

You can imagine why, this is a small village built on a rock etched in a harsh, dry landscape. Tough people, with the options of going either into farming or the church.

I found the last whicker worker in Trujillo, four generations and he would be the last. I loved watching him work and admired the work of his father. He was very happy to explain how the tools work and how the whicker is soaked and toasted and how it is split. He can't compete with plastic objects and the Chinese market, but showed me how their products are of an inferior quality to his. He was currently mending some chairs he had made 20 years earlier for a bar.

The bull head was a replica commissioned by a well known family in these parts, who had known Picasso, there is a famous picture of the painter holding a whicker bull head over his head, and they wanted a copy.

Before leaving I had a wander around and saw this tempting window display. A lot of the typical sweets here are made by local nuns, you can go directly to the four or five convents in Trujillo and buy it from them. You wont see the women, you simply ring a bell, state what you want, put the money in the rotating window and then wait for the packages to appear. The nuns have all taken a vow of silence and seclusion.

Time to head for Caceres.