A New Beginning

A small detail shot of the center of the tiny village I now call home. We are the only two-legged inhabitants.

I moved to Spain in 2017 with the goal of buying a house in Asturias. Previously I have not gone into too much detail about how that search was going. For one, it was not germane to Eating Asturias. For another, it was still ongoing. What would be the point of writing over and over “we looked at another house and decided against it”. Fortunately I now have something to report on that front. A new beginning for us, and for the site. ⊕ *Curro, living the retired life. Not a common end for a boar hunting hound.*
Curro, living the retired life. Not a common end for a boar hunting hound. Initially living in Valladolid, we spent every weekend traveling the 3-4 hours north to Asturias to look at property. Houses, apartments, empty buildings, farms, even derelict mills. We saw it all. We spent so much time driving back and forth that we bought a van and camperized it to spend even more time looking.

After a couple of years of that, even the camper van wasn’t cutting it. We rented a house in Asturias for above market price. We did so simply because it was less expensive than the gas needed to drive back and forth. There we spent two more years of looking at every single thing that came remotely close to meeting our requirements. We must have looked at a couple hundred houses over those four years. The vast majority we discarded almost immediately. I could probably create an entire site of Asturian Home Listing Disasters. Some of the things we have seen and the wildly inflated prices we have encountered would scarcely be believed.

A New Location

Then we met Fernando last November. He was selling a small farm in an otherwise abandoned village up a hollar not too very far from where we were renting.For those who were not blessed enough to grow up in the hills of Appalachia, a hollar or hollow is a dip between two mountains, not quite big enough to be a valley. They usually have a creek running down them and fertile land for farming. By definition they dead end at some point. This makes them undesirable to many, but quiet and peaceful for those predisposed to such things. See the definition of hondonada in the RAE for the closest cognate in Castellano Due to some health issues, he needed to move to an apartment closer to his doctors. However, he was having a hard time selling a bunch of mountain land up a dirt road 20 minutes from anywhere. That is especially difficult in a country where people complain if they have to walk 10 minutes to a store, bar, or school. Enter the Americans. Happy to only be commuting 20 minutes. Enamored of not having neighbors immediately outside their windows. Unbothered by unpaved roads. Unworried by buying groceries once a week. Looking for a new beginning in rural Asturias.

Just before Christmas 2021, we closed on Fernando’s small farm on a hill between the cuencas mineras, the two mining valleys that shape so much of Asturian identity these days.Properly called the Cuenca Hullera Central, and not to be confused with the actual and official Cuencas Mineras, a comarca in Teruel. It is comprised of the Valle del Caudal (Mieres, Lena, Aller, Ribera de Arriba, Morcín y Riosa) and the Valle del Nalón (Langreo, San Martín del Rey Aurelio y Laviana). A friendly(?) rivalry exists where when you tell someone you live in les Cuenques, they ask you “¿bueno o mala? – the bueno one being whichever one your questioner lives in.” The terms of the sale included some decidedly non-standard provisions. Chief among those was that we inherited a now-retired but locally famous hunting dog name Curro.

A New Focus

What does that mean for Eating Asturias? First, it meant a hiatus. From initial visit to closing was less than two months. And closing fell immediately before the holidays. And we all know that nothing gets done over the holidays. I barely got my tree up in time for Christmas Eve. And by the time Epiphany was over, it was time to get started on actually unpacking.Spain celebrates Epiphany by turning the three wise men into magical kings (Los Reyes Magos de Oriente) who deliver presents like Santa Claus. This means that most Spanish kids expect “Christmas morning” twice in two weeks. Where I am from in North Carolina, Old Christmas was, and sometimes still is, celebrated at the same time. ⊕ *Cloti, one of the laying hens. She doesn’t like people much, but she does like the camera.*
Cloti, one of the laying hens. She doesn’t like people much, but she does like the camera. It means that I will be writing more about my journey into farming in Asturias. Now I am participating directly in the agriculture and husbandry of Asturias. That will inform my writing here and on Eating Asturias directly. I will be sharing my direct experience in addition to continuing to report on the wider world of food in Asturias. I hope that this content will give you a better view of daily life in (rural) Asturias.

My daily routine has changed immensely since this site went into winter hibernation. Now I spend my mornings working on the farm. Gathering eggs. Building fences. Repairing rotten barn floors. Rewiring some very dodgy electrical installations. All those things that make home ownership bothersome but rewarding. I have just now gotten the place into a shape where I feel comfortable turning (half) my day back to the website. Even so, not everything is unpacked yet. Maybe it never will be.

So here I am. A new farm. And a new routine. New beginning. Be on the look out for more personal content in and among the cider reviews and sausage profiles and recipes. So many new recipes…