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The urgent utopia of returning to the field

2021-01-23T23:40:40.721Z


In the urban world, going to the country has always been an ideal of escape towards the good life, and never the city has captured us like with the pandemic. Some have already chosen to escape. Are we in a moment of change or before the eternal return of the rural chimera?


Carola is a three-year-old girl who has just discovered her love for tractors.

He has lived since July in Arboleya, an Asturian village of 30 neighbors.

Before, he lived in Tetuán, a district of Madrid of 161,000 inhabitants.

His brother, Tomé, is six years old and he likes the village because he can play here.

Today he has eaten cooked.

It's cold and Tomé blows soap bubbles into the clean winter air.

—In Madrid you could also play.

"Yes, but here I can go out and play alone."

In Ollauri (320 inhabitants; La Rioja) the school has reopened with the arrival of several children.

Héctor, a boy with long eyelashes and deep soul eyes, is one of them.

He is nine years old and lived on a tenth floor in Alcorcón.

During the pandemic, his parents had to take him to the psychologist because they believed he was going to die.

In September they moved to town.

One morning in December, he was at his desk making with his new elementary school classmates a tree made of cardboard on which they wrote their Christmas wishes.

"What did you ask for?"

"May no one in my family die."

And second, the

Cortex Challenge,

a memory game.

It was an October night when Samara arrived with her unemployed father from the city of Valencia to Villerías de Campos, a Palencia district with 60 residents.

She remembers that night that, as they approached by car, it was all very dark and she was hypnotized by the strange red flickering of the windmills.

He is 12 years old.

At first he was afraid that it would be difficult for him to integrate into the institute, but he has done well.

Study at the Jorge Manrique de Palencia, half an hour away by car.

"Who was Jorge Manrique?"

-I do not know.

I just arrived ...

"Could you Google it, please?"

"Yes, wait for me to go to the window to get coverage," he says in his room, mobile in hand.

Type and read that “Jorge Manrique was a Castilian poet of the Pre-Renaissance and a man of arms”.

El Frago (50 inhabitants; Zaragoza) was founded in the 12th century by Alfonso I el Batallador.

The Uruguayans —Verónica Giacoboni and Santiago Campiglia— arrived in September from the Levantine coast.

They have two mimetic Jack Russell dogs that only they can distinguish: Mila and her daughter Arya, who was named after the brave heroine of

Game of Thrones

who killed the King of the Night.

On June 21 the first state of alarm ended.

Five days later, Alona and Alberto got into their camping van and left their rental townhouse in the mountains of Madrid to start a new life in an old peasant house in Muras (Lugo), a City Council of 642 residents who since the middle the 20th century has lost 80% of its population.

The first night they spent in a tent in the courtyard.

At dawn they heard wolves.

To scare them away, they played techno music.

Ana Moreno and Julio Albarrán, Tomé and Carola's parents, had already planned to go to the field before Todo Esto happened.

All of this was what precipitated the operation, or, in Ana's words, "the necessary and definitive kick in the ass" to carry it out and finally move from the capital to a serene place like Arboleya.

How many people have done the same since March?

From where, to where, for what reasons?

We have no idea.

What exists is an accumulation of indications that we do not know if they can represent a milestone in a process that should take place in Spain: the structural - and spiritual - balance between urban and rural areas in a country that concentrates 41 of its 48 million citizens in 30% of the territory.

There are subjective cues - like your friend's ecstatic face in the selfie she sends you with her plump baby from her family's village, where she has gone to telework, and your reaction to the photo from the city: “I want a village and a plump baby ”-;

and there are objectives but specific: from initiatives of city councils that try to attract young population with good Internet to data such as the increase in searches for housing in municipalities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants registered by Idealista (14.8% of the total last November compared to to 10.1% in January 2020), or the surge in requests to move to a town that has had Proyecto Arraigo: 2,000 in 10 months, as many as in four years since they opened their repopulation aid company.

The National Institute of Statistics has advanced to

El País Semanal

that it plans to study in the coming months the population movements from the city to the countryside that may have occurred during the pandemic.

Analysis such as this seem essential to support the strategies of the General Secretariat for the Demographic Challenge, created in 2020;

the highest ranking ad hoc body in the history of the state government.

A neighbor passes a

path in Arboleya

.

"Do you think the camp will be reactivated?"

"I won't see it, but there is no other," he replies.

Well, there is the environment, the big cities (more expensive, more unequal, more saturated), the addiction to mobile phones and all this existential convulsion that has been the 21st century and that has the human being unable to breathe .

Unable to breathe with anxiety and unable to breathe due to the virus, which seems the pathogenic materialization of our time.

Julio Albarrán and Ana Moreno with their children Tomé and Carola in Arboleya.

THE KIDS ARE RIGHT

Carola and Tomé have a friend named Selma who lives in the next town.

Selma lived in Mexico City, and although she loved going to the movies there — let alone that afternoon when she saw

Zootopia,

starring the police rabbit Judy Hopps — she thinks there is one thing here that she likes even more: “El aire pure".

Ana and Julio, a 40-year-old textile artist and 37-year-old photographer, feel confident in the decision they have made.

“We came with doubts, but this is incredible.

Sometimes I stay silly looking out the window and he asked me if one day I will get fed up, "she says from her comfortable house with 400 euros a month of rent overlooking the Picos de Europa.

"You know what I miss though?" He adds.

"Every once in a while, a little call to Burger King."

The lands of the Haro region

are ocher, brown, reddish.

They have the metaphysical gravity of a canvas by Rothko or

Goya's

Half

-

sunken Dog

, and they make very good wines.

"Here you take for 80 cents a flat for which in Madrid they would charge you three euros," says Javier Ruiz in the Plaza de Ollauri, the town from which his mother escaped to the city in the sixties and to which he has returned with his family escaping from the city.

"I never thought that I could come and live here ...", he muses before the facade of a manor house whose shields Carmelo, his grandfather the stonemason, carved in sandstone.

Too many weeks were the four of them on the floor with the news of the pandemic.

Héctor began to say that he did not want to eat, that he had a thorn in his throat that was not going to come out.

The doctor explained that it was pure anguish.

They spent the summer in Ollauri at the home of Javier's late grandmother and the boy improved.

In September they returned to Alcorcón for the start of the course, but they were terrified of being confined there again.

They processed the change of file of Héctor to the school of Ollauri and that of his daughter Paula, 13 years old, to the nearby institute of Haro.

To take advantage of the space in the car, instead of using suitcases, Leticia García proposed to her husband squeezing the clothes into 30-liter garbage bags.

"How did it feel to see everything like this in your house?"

"Joy," Hector answers.

From Madrid he misses the metro and the trains.

On Sundays his parents took him by metro to Atocha station and there, from a footbridge, he enjoyed the arrivals and departures of the AVE.

The good English he brought from his bilingual school takes care of him with two hours a week of telematic conversation with children from other countries led by a teacher from the Philippines.

Héctor Ruiz García at his home in Ollauri with his dog, 'Trufa'.

THE KIDS ARE RIGHT

Paula was not clear about the town, although the only thing that really bothered her was distancing herself from her friend Andrea.

In itself, for her life in Alcorcón did not have great incentives: "There she had nothing to do apart from being at home reading or playing the piano," she says.

Here he has been in a gang and uses his mobile less, which does not prevent him from following on TikTok every day @payton, a

17-year-old

influencer

who especially values ​​“his hair”.

In Alcorcón his mother was a hairdresser in a center for the elderly.

With the pandemic he entered an ERTE.

Between Ollauri and its surroundings, she has not been slow to find work caring for the elderly at home.

For now, Leticia prefers her new life.

He believes that in the city “people only go to their ball”.

When they had been in town for a few weeks, her mother died and she felt sheltered by the affection of the neighbors.

The old condolences.

Fiber arrived here last year.

Thanks to that, Javier programs without problem for his company in Madrid from his grandmother Constantina's dining room.

He writes code on the same rubber tablecloth that was when they took him to town as a child and ate poached beans.

Equipped with a laptop and a desktop monitor, along with the wireless mouse that just arrived in the mail and two caged parrots, he feels "super good" in this room, although he has to remember to remove a creepy stuffed squirrel from a piece of furniture that grandmother liked very much.

"Mom, can you get me milk with cereal?"

"Cereals are not left, do you want a cola?"

"Well, okay, but add plenty of sugar."

David is the oldest.

He is 15 years old and he is the one who least wanted to come from Valencia to this windy town called Villerías de Campos.

His thing was hanging around with his colleagues, in his trendy look of slim pants and reflective silver jacket.

"The first days here I was pretty overwhelmed," he says.

“I was alone all day and I didn't leave the house.

But I'm getting used to it ”.

David is a boy with a keen aesthetic sense, and one thing that frustrated him when he arrived was that in Palencia they didn't cut his hair as he asked: "They cut everything off, and I wanted a gradient with short bangs in front."

Samara, the second, likes that in Villerías there are not as many cars or as much noise as in Valencia, "and that's cool", and Valencia liked the summer and the Fallas, "because it's all full of people."

To the third, Tatiana, 10 years old, thinks that her city was "very cool because there were many girls", although in her class in Ampudia - next to Villerías - she has a classmate named Alba who likes her wonderfully because she looks like Lucia, her best friend from Valencia, "and we have the same thoughts."

In the town, her favorite places are “the frog pond” and the cement soccer field, where she plays games with her parents and her brothers, including the youngest, Carmen, five years old, who insists on being interviewed as the others and he says in a rush "I like to play with the wind but I can't like it because if we don't get constipated".

From the left: Tatiana daughter, Samara, Carmen, Tatiana mother and David.

THE KIDS ARE RIGHT

Tatiana Arenas is 33 years old and her husband, David García, 35. She was a restaurant cook and entered an ERTE in March.

He had not been able to get a permanent job since two years ago he lost his job in a subcontractor for the Churruca nuts company.

"I used to load containers of sacks of Kikos for Turkey," he says. "The Turks are crazy about Kikos."

He says he spent the first months of the pandemic lending a hand in reformiles and in a mechanical workshop to add the basics to feed his children with his wife's unemployment.

They stopped paying the rent.

One day, Tatiana came up with the idea of ​​looking for information about towns that needed families and she came across Proyecto Arraigo.

The company with a social vocation run by Enrique Martínez and his son Juan, both engineers, put them in contact with Mariano Paramio, mayor of Villerías, producer of rich churra sheep cheese and a man with a single objective: “That our town be a people alive ”.

Paramio lived through the rural exodus in his childhood and maintains that more than half a century later a “change of perception” is emerging from that traumatic rejection of the countryside towards its revaluation.

The children of those who left, he reasons, are coming more on vacation and even renovating the houses because they see what the children enjoy — that is, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who emigrated to the cities for the sake of their children.

"It's like a spiral that, very slowly, begins to turn upside down," he observes.

Villerías had just rehabilitated the old priest's house and David and Tatiana had four children: one manna in a country in whose rural areas 12.4% of the population are under 15 years of age, those over 65 23.8% and the aging rate has increased by 30% in recent years, according to official data.

They rented the house at a low price and gave them jobs, him as a bailiff and she as manager of the City Hall bar.

Tatiana arrived with the two little girls in a rental car full of bags and with the milk, legumes, sausage and chicken that her evangelical pastor in Valencia offered her before leaving.

A paella teacher, in Villerías de Campos she has learned to cook garlic soup, she is recovering the time that she could not dedicate to her children before and she has almost stopped seeing

Save me.

“I have suffered a lot in this life, and since I believe in karma I have always thought that something great had to happen to me.

I imagined it would be the lottery or something like that;

but the other day he said to David: 'What if this was what had to happen to us?'

While Javier Ruiz,

in Ollauri, has the joy of having “100 mega fiber”, José Ramón Reyes carries the cross of a precarious cover for his town, El Frago, a beautiful medieval enclave erected on a rocky crag Aragonese.

Affiliated with the Communist Party since he was 14 years old, the mayor reflects one Sunday morning: "If Marx saw the potential of electricity to change the world, what would he have said about the Internet."

It will be ten o'clock, and the steam snorts from the coffee maker run by Santiago Campiglia in the bar.

Here Los Uruguayos are him and his partner, Verónica Giacoboni, because, in effect, they are Uruguayans.

They left Montevideo in 2018. Things were getting ugly in the suburbs, and they couldn't take it anymore when her mother was assaulted.

“They hit him with an iron in the head and blew out three teeth,” says Verónica.

They emigrated to Spain and worked in tourism in Xàbia until the pandemic.

They were left without income and with an onerous rent.

"The only help that came into the house was 30 euros a month from the City Council to buy at the Masymas supermarket," Santiago details.

Through Proyecto Arraigo they found the possibility of going to El Frago with an affordable rent and renting the bar from the mayor's mother.

"And the neighbors have given us a barbaric welcome," he says.

The customers are always the same and in just a couple of months the Bar 4 Reyes works as if Los Uruguayos had always run it.

They know, for example, that Domingo only drinks 0,0 beer, or that Eladio, the goatherd, likes orange Fanta in a tall glass "and with a splash of wine."

Verónica and Santiago are “happy”, although they spend the whole day at the bar.

When she can, she likes to knit or nap.

He values ​​that his domestic economy is now more sustainable.

Also that the air is "great" and you feel that it is luxuriously oxygenated when you go running.

Before entering the woods, yes, he asked if there were bears.

Eladio has become his master of local things and one afternoon he took him to teach him to know the mushrooms that are eaten: "The

rebollón

, the thistle mushrooms, the roe deer ...", says the pastor.

Santiago and Verónica in their bar.

At his feet, Mila and Arya.

THE KIDS ARE RIGHT

In addition to Los Uruguayos, Nando González and Noemí Abad arrived in El Frago in October, a couple from Santander - a parcel courier and private English teacher - burned from the city and scared with the virus because she has asthma.

"I couldn't take it anymore", confesses Nando, who, well wrapped up and with his fifth in hand in the Plaza Mayor, exudes fullness.

Another neighbor since the summer is Marina Joven, an occupational therapist whose grandparents bought a house long ago in El Frago.

He would like to stay, but since he works in person with his patients, he thinks he will have to return to Zaragoza.

Marina is in a wheelchair due to algodystrophy, a neurological disease that causes severe pain.

One of the benefits of the town, he says, is that after each outbreak it recovers sooner.

He speaks of silence, of sleeping better, of a neighbor knocking on the door to see how you are, that his head is going "at two thousand an hour, as always", but having the mountain next to him to go out for a while. meditate, and the sound of frost "giving away in the morning."

What a subtlety of verb: to give away not to give but to “Del lat.

regelāre

'to

defrost

”, says the RAE.

"Is going to the country a utopia?"

"Right now, yes," he answers at the bar, "but my generation is getting more and more interested and the administration is taking it into account."

I am one of those who believe that society advances, and I think that we are on our way.

Marina has given equality workshops in El Frago and has had her disagreements with the mayor's mother, Celia, a conservative although an enemy of machismo.

Santiago, who was doing kickboxing in Uruguay, gave a self-defense course and Celia explains that it consisted of learning how to hit a possible aggressor "to make him stunned."

Remember when the population here was 10 times greater than now and at school they studied in separate classrooms, with the Álvarez Encyclopedia as a common book and, apart, work for the girls and work in the garden for the boys.

In the sixties, he says, “it started with tractors and machines and there was no longer a need for so much labor, and it was a huge landing of people who went to France and Zaragoza.

Many men stayed because they had a piece of land and were deeply rooted, but the women went out to serve, and the great depopulation we have has come from so much single ”.

She finds it very difficult for El Frago to return to being a place as alive as when she was a child, even though her son is "doing the impossible."

The neighbors have rehabilitated the abbey and José Ramón anticipates that a couple from Soria with seven children will settle there shortly.

Also, expect a couple from Seville to come with four others.

The mayor could soon reopen the school, his number one challenge.

"Without children there is no town," he says with his Che Guevara shirt.

For Verónica Giacoboni, there would be a new clientele with which to try to take her proposal beyond hamburgers and her artisan pizzas.

“With the older ones it costs.

They wonder if I put pasta with meatballs on them.

They tell me: 'First pasta, then meatballs'.

The

zucchini

[zucchini] if I put it in soufflé either, because they take it in soup.

I started making sponge cake and they didn't eat it, because according to them it is only made for birthdays;

but then I used it to make muffins and now they do take it more with coffee ”.

Verónica makes an intercultural effort to combine the Uruguayan with the local, although as a joke she has warned the audience that, if they do not adapt, they will only be served stems of borage, a monastic vegetable from Aragon.

Alona Litovinskaya

shows on her mobile

the photos of when she was an executive in stilettos.

"I was like a bullet," he

smiles.

Like a shot.

Enough of that had already happened when he met Alberto Pérez Gordillo at a trance music festival in Las Hurdes.

He saw her, asked her if she had a fire and she said yes;

So this is how this unlikely couple was born in 2018: he from Mérida and she from Kazan.

Looking for a field, they went together to Miraflores de la Sierra, but the life of a townhouse an hour from Madrid did not satisfy them and in 2019 they left with their van to look for "something wild" in the north.

Going through Galicia, they saw on a website the advertisement of an uninhabited rural house years ago, they visited it and for them it had everything: access through a paved track, water from a spring that comes out of some rocks right there, papers in order and no another human for more than a kilometer around.

They did not care that it was "in semi-ruin", as Alberto defines it.

They bought and returned to Miraflores with the idea of ​​calmly reforming the house, but their gradual plan flew through the air with the confinement and as soon as they could they left for Muras.

They have been living in this 19th century farmhouse for half a year, located on a green slope that leads to a stream and whose side there is only one other house, abandoned decades ago and in which Alona feels the “presence of energy”.

"This was chaos when we arrived," he says.

Now it is also chaos, but habitable chaos.

Alona and Alberto in the patio of their house, in a remote corner of Galicia.

THE KIDS ARE RIGHT

At this point they have managed to clean up with warmth, and some leak, the part where the haystack was.

The mattress is on the floor wrapped in duvets: two on top, one on the bottom.

They are heated with a wood stove.

They have good chorizo ​​and good local cheese.

What they don't have is good internet.

Alberto, a sound technician, has hung on the balcony clothesline a grocery bag that contains an old mobile that acts as an antenna and captures the 4G signal, and they get

coverage inside

via

Bluetooth

.

Alona says that if in places like this there were a quality connection, her

techie

friends

from San Francisco, where she lived after Kazan and Moscow, would be happy.

She has the illusion of setting up “immersive music projects” around her home.

He, who spent seven years working in Barcelona and six in Madrid, wishes to be able to sustain his life here when Todo Esto dies down, "perhaps going out for seasons to work in the city."

They love being in the middle of nowhere and having the municipal seat a few minutes away.

They often go shopping or eat at the Café Restaurante O Santi, which has a superb menu of 10 euros and on top of that they receive the parcel.

Today Alberto has first lentils and cod with onion, and Alona salad and second grilled hake with cooked potato.

In addition, she will go home with a vest that she ordered from Zara and he with a gasoline chainsaw that she ordered from Amazon.

Jeff Bezos and Amancio Ortega do not believe that there is an empty Spain.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-01-23

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