In the Sierra de Cádiz they still believe in healers

The cloud of incense, the dim light and the ethnic music that comes out of a mobile contribute, as they can, to the mystery.

On the stretcher table, a sea of ​​objects: rosemary and laurel bushes, a bottle of alcohol, figurines of a virgin and two angels, a horseshoe, a white candle and the full burner that clouds the room.

On the other side of the smoke, the circumspect face of Pepa Amaya appears and she clarifies from the outset: “I am not a witch, in any case, a healer or healer.

That later in the town they point me out...”.

She is nervous about speaking openly about a taboo subject in the Sierra de Cádiz, although in her town, Zahara de la Sierra, many know that they can come to her if they believe that her rituals, halfway between traditional medicine and myths, serve For something.

The fact that few in the mountains of Cadiz decide to speak openly about healers does not mean that they have stopped believing in them.

Moreover, a sample of health professionals consulted in the area assures that "73.3% of the population they serve has myths or beliefs about health", according to the academic article

, published in the international scientific journal

.

70% of patients believe that these "healers" are capable of curing herpes, 30% trust the remedies with herbs from the field or 45.5% maintain that eating bacon is healthy.

These are the results reached by the author of the study, María de los Santos Oñate, a nurse, professor at the University of Cádiz and a resident of the area.

Accustomed to “hearing from childhood” the belief in these pseudosciences, Oñate launched herself to analyze if she was really still alive, within a doctoral thesis that analyzes the relationship between health and rural areas.

The researcher managed to get a sample of 45 health professionals from Arcos de la Frontera, Ubrique, Villamartín or Olvera —belonging to the five Basic Health Zones in which the 19 municipalities of the Sierra are organized— to answer a questionnaire, which she then compared with patients.

The results corroborated the nurse's suspicions, but opened a new avenue of research that she believes should be exploited to prevent her neighbors from exposing themselves to dangers without a scientific basis: "We have to know our patients to know their health needs and to provide them with quality care.

Sitting in a circle around that still life of herbs and symbols, Pepa Amaya and her friends María Jesús Fernández and Teresa Arias —the first, a believer;

the second is also defined as “healer”—they list myths they know or practice: black powder for “culverins” —herpes—, torvisca crosses as protection, garlic for warts or massages with secret herbs macerated in alcohol for skeletal pain and muscular, the latter, Amaya's specialty.

The 60-year-old woman defines herself "with grace" and assures that a healer "never charges", because then she loses those supposed powers.

“Some remedies can make sense and logic, they are still an application of chemistry of natural origin to a problem, others are of mythical origin and are not justifiable.

But as a doctor

From left to right, Teresa Arias, Pepa Amaya and María Jesús Fernández, in Benamahoma, in the Sierra de Cádiz.Juan Carlos Toro

Rodríguez knows some of these solutions well because he was able to document them in the article

in which he listed up to 129 rituals to treat ailments as diverse as styes, colds, hiccups, rheumatism or the supposed evil eye.

For all of them, remedies are proposed that are a hodgepodge of country herbs, sometimes seasoned with ceremonies of strange origin.

For Benamahoma historian Joaquín Gómez —at whose house Amaya and her friends meet— they are nothing more than manifestations of how “all cultures have used ancestral rites and plants for the sanitation of the community”.

Rodríguez even exemplifies how the use of lizards —and their blood— is indicated as a remedy both at the end of the 20th century, when he studied it, and in references in the works of the Latin author Pliny

, 1,900 years ago.

reconverted myth

Away from large population centers and previously without direct access to doctors —due to distance or cost—, the Sierra de Cádiz has kept these beliefs alive for millennia, something that was not alien to other Spanish rural areas.

The researcher Ventura Leblic García —cited by Oñate in his study—already explained in 1979 how all these remedies and superstitions were superimposed in the mountains of Toledo as Judeo-Muslim traditions, Hispano-Roman heritage and even previous indigenous.

"With the arrival of Catholicism, it is linked to it, but outside of what is official," Gomez details.

And, in this context, women and their culture of caring for the home are linked to the concept of healers, healers or people with supposed gifts.

"Nobody bothered that a woman who knows how to handle plants attended cases that science could not reach," details the historian.

Although that did not free them from serious shocks.

The Museum of the Witches of Zugarramurdi (Navarra) recalls how the Spanish Inquisition was fattened between 1610 and 1611 with women who, for the most part, only applied inherited natural remedies.

Even today, Amaya does not even want to hear about witchcraft, something that she links to something evil, dangerous and negative.

"In town, you are the one who has done something, it is a double edge because if I fail, they can point me out," explains the woman, concerned.

Neither Oñate nor Rodríguez know for sure the reason why all these superstitions are still alive in the Sierra de Cádiz.

The researcher hypothesizes the isolation of the past, which "has resulted in a slower evolution in rural societies than in urban societies."

Rodríguez also points out that the myths have found an apparently peaceful accommodation in the gaps left by scientific medicine.

This is what he calls the “gap theory” or the coverage that these remedies provide for the shortcomings that the current health system still suffers from.

Amaya doesn't go into reasons, but she does make clear a recommendation that she makes to the people who come to her: "If you're a doctor, don't leave it, that's the first thing."

However, that is not enough for María de los Santos Oñate, who hopes that some researcher will pick up the gauntlet that she has thrown down with her study.

"It is crucial to understand the myths and beliefs about the health of a population, in order to provide reliable knowledge," she states in the conclusions of her analysis.

The professor believes that it is necessary "to go to the scientific evidence to see if patients are being harmed."

Orestes points in the same direction: “The question is whether with what is prescribed to you with infusions you get a sufficient dose to treat the problem: you will hardly control anxiety by taking a double tila.

In addition, natural products produce undesirable effects, there are juicy mushrooms and others that can kill you.

The idea is always that, at least it does no harm,

Perhaps, by the time that necessary research arrives that ends in awareness campaigns for patients who still believe in healers, in the Sierra de Cádiz they will have already stopped believing in them.

When Rodríguez carried out the study of him, in 1996, the average age of the fifty of his respondents was almost 52 years old.

The septuagenarian María Jesús Fernández is what she also sees as a trend, much to her chagrin: “My children tell me I'm crazy.

This will be lost."

But Pepa Amaya replies and makes it clear that she will make it difficult for the logical evolution of the times: “Mine says that he doesn't believe, but he always asks me: 'Mom, what can I do to remedy this?'

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