Espinama by Shenaz Khimji.
As the evening draws in, wood smoke fills the streets and the black redstarts begin singing. I manage to make some studies of a magnificent fresh coloured male which I will be able to add to the roof composition later on.
There is an incredible old complex of barns near our albergue and also several singing black redstarts in the vicinity. I decide to make a second attempt at the composition of the roof and redstart I first thought of in Bulnes. This time, learning from my mistakes I focus on a smaller detail in the landscape but one which has several dynamic lines and a greater sense of depth. We paint all afternoon, Shenaz painting the whole scene of the barn and myself the detail through a fieldscope. Many of the neighbours visit us bringing apples from there gardens or walnuts from the trees around the allotments. One man in his 80’s unlocks a door to what we thought was a normal house in the village centre, to reveal a harvest festival of wild nuts, oranges, apricots, potatoes, onions and in a separate room, chickens. Looking around, we see that many of the houses in the village are being used to store bales of hay (straw poking out the windows) and later on we even see another being used to keep cattle, two men struggling to squeeze a stroppy heifer through the front door.
Jose explains to us later, when passing by to give us a wild boar sausage he made himself (he shot the boar too), that the reason many local families have 2 or 3 properties in the village, as well as a cabana in the mountains, is because they have accumulated their relatives homes overtime as inheritance. No one really sells the houses because, he says, they are not worth much and as in Bulnes, many youngsters don’t want to stick around. Of course tourism and the nearby teleferique are seen as a positive thing, we are certainly being made welcome and people are very content in their close knit community.
Jose explains to us later, when passing by to give us a wild boar sausage he made himself (he shot the boar too), that the reason many local families have 2 or 3 properties in the village, as well as a cabana in the mountains, is because they have accumulated their relatives homes overtime as inheritance. No one really sells the houses because, he says, they are not worth much and as in Bulnes, many youngsters don’t want to stick around. Of course tourism and the nearby teleferique are seen as a positive thing, we are certainly being made welcome and people are very content in their close knit community.
As the evening draws in, wood smoke fills the streets and the black redstarts begin singing. I manage to make some studies of a magnificent fresh coloured male which I will be able to add to the roof composition later on.
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