There is a hamlet called Os Ferreiros in the parish of San Martiño de Anllo, in Sober. There is another in O Saviñao, one in Chantada, one in Paradela, one in A Pobra do Brollón, and in two of those the smiths named not only the hamlet but the parish around it. The names are what is left of an economy. It ran for centuries, it organised itself without anyone designing it, and for a long time it worked.
The rule was simple: a parish did what its ground allowed, and tried to do it better than the parish next door. Two hamlets from the Sober forge the soil turns to clay, and Gundivós made black earthenware out of it. Further on the land flattens and holds water, and Neiras raised cattle and cut fodder on the damp valley floor while the parishes above it, pinned to the slope, could grow little but vines. Nobody assigned these roles. They were settled by what each parish was standing on, and once settled they held for generations, because the alternative was to be worse at something a neighbour had already mastered.
That kind of specialisation pays for skill, since skill is the only advantage on offer. In the parish of Santa María de Niñodaguia, in the concello of Xunqueira de Espadanedo, the seam at Monte do Barro in Veigachá runs heavy with kaolin, and fired hot it yields a pottery so pale, light and resonant that the standard local comparison is porcelain. The parish built its trade on that: the yellow ware, the orella de boi glaze, three communal kilns, a whole village of cacharreiros. A pot that weighs less and breaks less travels further from home and fetches more when it gets there. The quality was not decoration. It was the business model.
The fair turned the skill into income. Agustín Vázquez, who still works clay in Niñodaguia, remembers asking his uncle at eleven whether he could help make pots for the fair at Baños de Molgas; the load sold for eight thousand pesetas and the boy was paid six hundred. That is the whole mechanism in one transaction — a parish arrives with what only it can make, leaves with cash or with somebody else’s grain, wine or ironwork, and does it again a fortnight later somewhere else. It was not subsistence. It was trade, run at parish scale, and it could scale further when the roads allowed: Niñodaguia went on to sell cazuelas and queimada bowls wholesale across Spain, with the Basque Country as its strongest market.
The most successful trade of all was not made of clay. Somewhere between 1865 and 1870, the first grinding wheels appear at the fair in Luíntra, in Nogueira de Ramuín. They worked, and within a generation the knife-sharpener with a wheel on his back had become the standard export of a tight cluster of concellos — Nogueira de Ramuín, O Pereiro de Aguiar, Esgos, Xunqueira de Espadanedo, Castro Caldelas, San Xoán de Río — six of which sit inside Ribeira Sacra as it is drawn today. They went to Ourense, then Bilbao and Barcelona, then Havana, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. They took a private argot with them, the barallete, which kept prices and customers unintelligible to outsiders and was in that sense a piece of commercial equipment.
The two stories meet in one man, and in one concello. Around 1920 a potter known as O Luíntra introduced red clay to Niñodaguia, which gave the parish ware that could sit directly on fire. He knew about it because he spent his winters working as a knife-sharpener in Castile. The emigration did not only drain the parishes; for a while it fed them, carrying technique home along the same roads that took the men out. A trade good enough to travel produced men who travelled, and some of what they saw came back and improved the trade that stayed.
Then it stopped, and not because anyone abandoned anything. An aluminium pot weighed less than a clay one and did not break when dropped. A factory blade cost less than a forged one. A tractor did not need shoeing, and when it broke, the part was ordered rather than forged. The system was outcompeted object by object, and every swap was cheaper or easier for whoever made it. Vázquez states the outcome as a potter would: nobody needs to replace a piece that used to break with daily use, so what he sells now is mostly ornament. Niñodaguia is down to two workshops. Four hamlets in the territory are still called Ferrería — the ironworks. One person lives in all four.
Something has replaced the system, and it allocates work the same way, from outside the parish. In the last completed rural development cycle the local action group put a little over eight million euros into 143 projects, and most of it went to agroforestry and tourism. The old economy asked what a parish had and how well it worked it. The new one asks what the call for applications will fund, and the answer is the same in Sober as in Quiroga as in Nogueira de Ramuín. At the level of a single household it is not really a choice but the only door standing open, and whether it works is a separate argument. It is also why a territory that once held twenty different answers now mostly holds two.
Hands and clay. A potter in Niñodaguia, Xunqueira de Espadanedo — photo by amaianos.
Monument to the knife-sharpener, by Buciños, in Luíntra — photo by HombreDHojalata.
