Sunday in Portalrubio

Yesterday we drove from Zaragoza to the village (Portalrubio, in this case: Spaniards say "the village" the way Minnesotans say "the lake" or "the cabin").

image from Spanish Wikipedia: "Detalle de la localización de Portalrubio en el mapa del Reino de Aragón de Juan Bautista Labaña (1619)"

The weather was unexpectedly warm, warm enough to pull a table outside and eat in the winter sun. Black and green olives, cheese, bread, morcilla, fuet, omelettes (one with tuna and one with perejil from the garden). We strolled around the village admiring the various reconstruction projects. There was plenty of water at la fuente, the miracle of water bubbling up from an aquifer in spite of the lack of snow and rain over the last few decades; Rosemary's grandfather talks about how there used to be abundant snow every year and now it hardly snows at all, the knife edge of climate change.

On the way back home, we meandered along a back round through neighboring villages: Pancrudo, Cervera del Rincón,

We saw buitres leonados (Griffon vultures, or gyps fulvus), riding the thermal currents in a gorge where we were walking. There were maybe 15 or so, sailing, circling. Their wingspan (envergadura) can reach 2 meters. This endangered species is making a modest comeback.

We also say two groups of cabras montañesas or (capra pyrenaica, also called cabra montés, cabra hispánica or íbice ibérico) from the road. It was so unexpected to see them because they are almost invisible against the landscape, their coloring so like the rocky mountainside.
We didn't get as close as in this video, but we really enjoyed how they stared back at us before moving on:

The end of summer in Portalrubio

Blas sent us these pictures from the village where he was with his parents.
A wild mountain goat--I've never seen one!

The blackberries were plentiful this year, and there are also some plums.

A little history of Portalrubio

Portalrubio has its own Wikipedia entry in Spanish! It is obviously written with great love for the village.

Here is a page that situates Portalrubio as a "localidad" of a neighboring ayuntamiento Pancrudo, in the comarca of the Comunidad de Teruel, which is one of the 10 comarcas making up the province of Teruel. Teruel, Huesca and Zaragoza are the three provinces of Aragon, one of the Autonomous Communities of Spain. This site about Aragon has been put together by Javier Mendivil, an amateur historian who has dedicated himself to documenting on Internet the history of Aragon. I'll bet he makes regular visits to the Rastro, the flea market in Zaragoza, on the hunt for old pamphlets, books and documents to add to his collection.

I also turned up this fascinating page, created by Manuel P. Belanche, a history buff and "friend of Gregorian chant", in which he has compiled a list of all the towns and villages of Aragon in order to document the existence of a particular type of structure called a "peiron":

Los peirones, también denominados pairones, son pilares o monolitos construidos en piedra o ladrillo que señalan, a la salida de una gran parte de los pueblos de Aragón -principalmente en Teruel y Zaragoza- un inicio o confluencia de caminos. Suelen terminar, en su parte superior, con una hornacina (a veces una cruz) decorada por la imagen de un santo o virgen.

These stone or brick pillars marked the crossroads. Originally probably of pagan origin, they now have a cross or a Christian image, since the conquest of the territory by Alfonso el Batallador in 1120. The word peiron is not Castilian Spanish, but rather Aragonese. In a second page on this site, he has a list of Aragonese words that he collected years ago; with the exodus of people from the villages into the cities and the extension of education in Castillian Spanish to the entire population, the use of Aragonese has declined.

Here is the page for Portalrubio and its peirones. Although the village has been reduced to no more than 30 or so official residents, in August several hundred will gather, from Zaragoza, Valencia, Barcelona and other towns, to reunite generations of families.

Oooh! I discover Photoshop.

Better late than never, eh? This is a picture from Spain, with the "watercolor" feature of Photoshop applied.