Bubión: Museo Casa Alpujarreña

What a smashing final day we had in Bubion. First we walked to the location of the Donald Gray sketch we studied during yesterday’s rainy day. It actually turned out to be the house next-door to the one we posted yesterday. (We get quite excited when we find a perfect match like this because it means we can place an accurate waypoint on the Wikiloc tracks we are making of historic sites.) Walking under the tinao that looks like a doorway in the photo, we came to an adarve with several more houses, including one that had a vernacular wooden balustrade across the open upper floor. We’ve never seen one of those outside before, probably because the wood deteriorates and is replaced by wrought iron, so this felt like another important find for the Wikiloc track. (All the houses built before 1950 in Bubión have protected status because the village has been declared a Bien de Interés Cultural.)

We didn’t have any particularly high hopes for the museum. The tourist website describes it as housing 500 items from the past. It sounded like the kind of place where you look at a room quickly before your eyes glaze over at seeing 50 old farm tools that look exactly alike hanging neatly side-by-side on a wall. Boy, were we mistaken!

As we walked in the door, we were greeted by Fina, whose knowledge and enthusiasm made this one of the two best museum visits we have ever had in Spain. (The other being the grain mill in Fondón where an elderly man invited us in and proceeded to tell us of his childhood working in this building, his father’s mill. )

Fina’s parents were both born in Bubión, her father in 1929 and her mother in 1936, hard years to live in an agricultural village with no running water or electricity. Her father never had the opportunity to go to school; her mother, one of 14 children, learned to read as an adult. Her father went to Germany after the war to make enough money to come back and be able to buy his own land rather than work as a renter.

The casa that is now the museum originally housed a family of seven. In the 1970s, one son moved to Granada and came back with a novel idea for his parents. He built a cistern under the house, directed water to it from a nearby spring, installed a pump in the stables over the cistern, and, voila, his mother could have water in the kitchen!

Luckily, we were the only visitors this morning, so Fina was able to explain everything to us. Her stories were fascinating. She showed us a carbide lamp, explained how it worked with a little dial on top that regulated how much water dripped into the bottom chamber, mixing with the calcium carbide and producing acetylene gas that escaped from the spout and could be lit. These lamps were used by miners all over the world, but here in Bubion, they were also used by the farmers who needed to open the gates to their acequias during the middle of the night when it was dark. Fina told us that today it isn’t a problem; there are so many fewer farmers that everyone can have an irrigation turn during the daylight hours, But as you can see from the photo taken on the era below town, in days past there were many more farmers here. Up until the 1970s, all the fields on the terraces across the river were farmed, and someone had to have an irrigation turn at night. Now those fields are all abandoned.

Everything the farmers used was made with materials that were locally available. Because there was no road to the Alpujarra until the 1960s, almost every necessary tool was made from wood or esparta grass…panniers for the mules, ropes, saddles, hoes, shovels…every farm implement you could think of. One really interesting item that Fina showed us looked like a mask made of esparta with wooden horns sticking out of the eyebrows. This was tied onto the head of a baby goat after it reached an age where it could browse for fodder. When the kid came up to the mother to try to continue to nurse, the mother was pricked by the horns and shooed the kid away. That way, the milk was preserved for the farmer’s family.

At the end of our delightful visit, we asked Fina if she could tell us whether the threshing machine in a photo in the museum could still be seen. We had been looking for it all week (it’s on the ADR fichas) but had not turned up its location. She gave us exact directions, and the early wooden thresher is still there! When Ned was taking photos at the era, several young men from the village came over to help him determine exactly what the background was in the museum photo, lining up the ravines in the photo with the ravines they were familiar with across the river. Their generosity was a fine ending to a great day and a very rewarding week.Read more