Friday, July 21, 2006

Sunday is Harvest Day in El Palmar

Buenavista town hall, in association with local farmers, are organizing the Día de la Siega (Harvest Day) in El Palmar this weekend, an annual event which aims to rescue and revitalize ancient and traditional customs in this rural area.

The fun starts from 10 a.m. in fields around the finca of Los Pedregales.

It's a chance for everyone to muck in and help with cutting the wheat: a labour made that much less difficult when the task is shared and there is good music and food laid on - described as "a tasting of typical products of the land."

This is one of several events in the agricultural calendar locally that have been turned into festivities, though they are not mere exhibitions. This is a way of getting the real work done and not just a kind of ethnographic Disney Park.

After the wheat has been cut and had a chance to dry, in September, at the end of the valley's main annual fiesta, is the Día de la Trilla (Threshing Day).

Other events are the sowing and the ’recogida de la papa’ (Potato Harvest).

Farming here in this valley is still carried out using mostly manual methods very similar to those described in this article about Bakhdida in Iraq. Ploughs here are mostly machine, but individually operated, or at best pulled by a small tractor, but cutting is frequently done by hand with sickles and threshing here is still done on the floor of stone circles by horses and oxen pulling a type of wooden sled.

It is impossible to fully mechanize methods here because of the geography. Field sizes have to be kept small as they are terraced onto some pretty steep terrain.

Indeed, the mill stone shown being used by these three girls is of exactly the same type used by the Berber tribes in North Africa and by the Guanches here in the Canary Islands. These have mostly been superseded by small mills, but their use carried on here after the conquest and well into the 20th Century and, I'll bet there is still someone around here who uses such mill stones in their home.

Buenavista del Norte celebra este domingo el dia de la siega en el Barrio de El Palmar