I’m living in Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s cottage. We’ve come to Taramundi, a little mountain town in Asturias, to stay for three weeks or so while my husband does some work on the old house we, his siblings, and cousins bought three years ago. It was once their grandfather’s house, the one he left back in the twenties to immigrate to America. I think he’d find it ironic that his grandchildren have come back to a place and a house he left so gladly all those years ago.
Antonio de Roxo as a prosperous New Yorker
My husband’s grandfather left behind poverty and subsistence farming, but also staggeringly spectacular views and great food. Actually, he brought the food along with him, but the landscape is almost impossible to put into words. It’s dramatic, beautiful, dumbfounding, and a little surreal too, because after years (hundreds of years) of logging and fires, the trees to replace the ones lost have been planted in enormous swathes of perfectly even lines. This oddly artificially element in a landscape so wild and elemental-looking, a place where even the houses look as if they sprang organically from the mountainside, is hard to discern at first precisely because of its incongruity. You look out your window and see something vaguely strange, something a little Middle Earth-like about the view, and then you suddenly realize that every tree in the forest is growing exactly behind another one, and, even stranger, that they’re all the same variety of tree as well.
Like the rest of the old houses that stud the mountainside, our house is hundreds of years old. It’s going to need a lot of work to make it habitable, and the work is hampered partly because all of the contractors in the area are booked nearly two years in advance. That’s because the town of Taramundi and the countryside surrounding it are experiencing a dramatic boom in tourism. Instead of barely getting by in ancient houses that have had few modern improvements and living a lifestyle that wouldn’t have been so out of place more than a hundred years ago, the people here are renovating those same houses and renting them out to people from Madrid or Barcelona, who’re looking for a break from the oppressive summertime heat and can’t get enough of the views.
It’s easy to sentimentalize the old ways of Taramundi and lament their passing, but it’s also possible that there wouldn’t be very much of Taramundi left, other than a few old people who hadn’t died yet, if this new industry hadn’t come along to save everyone.
“The name Taramundi can move mountains,” my husband’s cousin, Mari-Carmen, told us. And it’s true. Carbon steel knives made in Taramundi are sold all over Spain as souvenirs, and its cheese can be ordered from both Despana and La Tienda in the US. Spaniards of all ages come to hike its trails and fish in its trout-filled streams. The poverty my husband’s grandfather ran away from used to hold the town in a death grip, even into the eighties and early nineties, but now the outhouses have been replaced with real bathrooms, roads are paved, and electricity is everywhere.
When given the choice, I think, wouldn’t anyone choose comfort over the (smelly, damp, cold) picturesque--every time? There’s a strong sense of local pride and a deep attachment to not just the place itself but the history of the place here. That means that fortunately, the renovation being done and the new structures being built are well integrated with the architecture that was here before. There’s virtually no commercialization at all, if you discount the two gift shop/grocery store/hardware stores that sell t-shirts and knives and other tchokes with “Taramundi” emblazoned upon them. Although I instinctively recoil when I watch a Madrilêno buy a bunch of old skeleton keys or an iron cauldron to take back to their apartment to pot a plant in, I can’t begrudge a population that can make money from their old keys while using brand new ones to houses with the kind of kitchens that have made the little three-legged pot obsolete.
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