Dozens of plastic bottles hanging from the balconies accompany the passerby with a musical drumming swayed by the cold wind in Lastras de Cuéllar (Segovia, 360 inhabitants).
The houses, many of them already closed due to the exodus that sends their inhabitants into larger nuclei and with more resources, display banners with slogans from another century.
“Drinking ballast now!” They pray, because the aquifers under the town have levels of arsenic and nitrates that are unsuitable for human consumption.
Toxins from farm slurry and chemical fertilizers are filtered and condemn the aging population to depend on bottles subsidized by the Junta de Castilla y León or on the carafes provided by their families.
They have been like this for six years.
The town's goal: to connect a pipe to a nearby spring.
Until then, bend your back and load and load.
Hermenegildo Cabrera looks good in his 80s and nimbly handles a wheelbarrow with several batches of six and a half liter bottles that serves them a truck every Monday for 30 cents each batch (in summer the town consumes some 5,000 bottles a week).
A vest and a beret protect this retired farmer from the cold who, unfortunately, has had his old tractor taken away.
He greets his faithful friend Pablo Villagrán, a retired pastor, with caustic Castilian humor: "If we see each other, we are alive."
Cabrera, who stores firewood for the fire and empty bottles in the yard, only uses running water to shower and wash and assumes that it is impossible to plug the population leak.
The depopulation - the census has fallen more than 20% in these six years - reveals Mercedes Rodríguez, 41, head of a platform that has managed to bring the disorder to the political arena.
The celestial mask of the ballast woman exhibits the claim of the collective.
She was the one who encouraged her neighbors to decorate their walls with the bottles and to design the banners present throughout the town.
Even the Christmas tree is formed with the thousands of bottles they spend each month.
Rodríguez points to a “problem of political neglect” that emerged when studies in 2014 revealed high levels of arsenic in groundwater.
The remedy, a filter of 50,000 euros, was insufficient because soon they detected harmful levels of nitrates.
The legal limit is 50 milligrams of nitrates per liter and 10 micrograms of arsenic per liter.
Those of Lastra de Cuéllar vary according to the month.
August narrowly missed those figures.
Yes, September did.
In case the flies people do not drink from the tap: the protest group has designed labels that read "Water with source contamination" to attract the attention of politicians.
The solution is just four kilometers in a straight line, a few more by car among the dense Segovian pine forests.
A source that emanates from the Cega River provides its waters to five towns in the area through pipes that Lastras dreams of.
The planned investment will require half a million euros, unaffordable for the City Council but which it hopes to be covered with the support of the Board and the Provincial Council.
What was agreed is that these two entities share 80% of the disbursement and the rest, about 100,000 euros, is provided by the municipal coffers.
Rodríguez trusts that the promises of the Board (PP-Ciudadanos) will bear fruit in 2021.
The mayor, Andrés García (Cs) affirms that if this division is confirmed, the City Council will have to request a loan and hopes that next year they will have the pipeline.
García believes that his neighbors are sometimes “more papistic than the Pope” in avoiding consumption even when the analyzes show that the water, by little, does not exceed the border of unhealthy.
The main agora in times of closed bars and social distance takes place in front of the Fernando Martín grocery store, which sells everything and serves as a meeting point.
There, several elderly people protest because they pay taxes religiously but need bottled water to cook some lentils: "We are up to the hat!"
The small and gray-haired María Ángeles Cabrero, 68, has adapted her routines to this reality.
Sometimes she walks to the spout where, crouching and holding her balance, she fills jugs from the jet that gushes out of the Cega raft from which they long to feed.
More than a few slips, he says between laughter and concern, there have been.
"The work of rural women is not seen," he adds next to the incipient channel.
Back in the center of Lastras, Faustina Fernanz, 79, combines the pink of her dressing gown with that of her sneakers and the gray of her eyes with that of her hair.
"My children bring me 20 five-liter jugs when they come," she says, protected from the wind by the curtain that covers her door.
Her husband, Juan Muñoz, 80, also uses a wheelbarrow to speed up the transfer, but when he is not there, the woman - with sciatica - must carry the packages.
The lack of water compromises the present and the future: the school.
Lastras still enjoys school, but next year a family will leave and they will not be able to have the minimum number of students to support it.