During the summer months, Josep Jordana, a 56-year-old sheep farmer, moves his flock from this hamlet of just a dozen residents, perched on the Catalan side of the Pyrenees, up a dirt track to graze at higher altitudes. He spends his days walking up and down the slopes in search of the lushest pastures, trying to keep his 1,300 sheep close together. Shepherding is a tough and solitary job that mountain farmers have passed on for as long as anybody here can remember — “at least seven or eight generations” in the case of Jordana’s family, he said. But, as rural communities like this one are slowly depleted, that tradition is changing.
For the past four months, Jordana, who has no children. has been teaching sheep farming to Laura Madrid, 28, who is quite an unlikely shepherd. With a master’s degree in biology, Madrid had originally planned to pursue a doctorate in her home city, Barcelona — until she decided to apply to Catalonia’s school of shepherds.
Jordana said he was still coming to terms with the idea that shepherding could be taught in a school and rewarded with a certificate delivered by the regional ministry of agriculture. “It used to be just something that you learn from your dad,” he said. Still, he acknowledged that without the arrival of people like Madrid from the cities there would soon be nobody willing to take over the ancestral shepherd’s crook, as well as to maintain rural traditions and remote communities like Aguiró.
From 1982 to 2009, the number of sheep farms in Catalonia almost halved, from 3,964 to 2,085, according to the most recent census. There are no official statistics for the number of shepherds, but fewer than a dozen now work in the mountains of Catalonia, and most of them are nearing retirement age, according to the Catalan school of shepherds.
“We’re trying to maintain a generational handover that otherwise would probably no longer take place,” said Vanesa Freixa, director of the school, which opened in 2009 and is one of four such schools across Spain.
Madrid is among 14 students who this month will complete a five-month course run by the school. The course starts with a month of classroom instruction, covering topics like nutrition and animal diseases. The students are then sent across the region to spend four months working alongside a veteran shepherd.
She argued that the school’s popularity was not so much due to Spain’s near-record unemployment as it was to people’s desire for an alternative to the hustle and bustle of urban life. Half of her applicants already have a university degree, she said.
Some shepherds certainly seem to enjoy the recognition that their profession is getting. “Until recently, the shepherd was often the idiot or the cripple in the family, the one who couldn’t do the most important farming work, but this is now a job for which you get respect,” said Armand Flaujat, who tends sheep for seven farmers during the summer months, high up in the meadows of Catalonia’s largest nature park, which are covered with snow the rest of the year.
Madrid said working alongside Jordana had helped reshape her views on education. “There are different types of knowledge, but it’s as important to know how to work in a lab as how to manage a plot of land,” she said. “I might know the name of a plant that he doesn’t know, but he clearly knows whether his sheep should eat that plant or not.”
After the training with Jordana, Madrid said she hoped to start tending sheep in another remote mountain town in October. “I guess I also enjoy the loneliness,” she said.— New York Times News Service
Without the arrival of people from the cities there would soon be nobody willing to take over the ancestral shepherd’s crook, as well as to maintain rural traditions and remote communities
