THE TRADITIONAL PATRIMONY OF LA VERA, CÁCERES

Guitarvera is a word created from guitar and Vera to designate, in a short form, some days of popular culture which have been celebrated in Villanueva de la Vera for some years now. Their aim is, on one side to approach certain aspects of popular culture both through the reflections of specialists and public presentations. On the other side, to relive those aspects in such a way as to make them known to, and appreciated by, the young generations. Although their starting point belongs to a local environment, they address, as all popular culture events, a wider span. This way, they encompass the villages of La Vera (Cáceres) and those of the Valle del Tiétar (Ávila), both regions being located between the southern slope of Gredos and the Tiétar river and, by extension, to most of rural spain.

All the villages of both regions have stayed, because of geographical circumstances, quite isolated through history, especially those of the province of Cáceres. Due to the height of the Central mountain range and its steepness, their relationships with the north slope have been scarce.

The influence of offcial culture and the incorporation of new ways of life have been delayed and, only from the widespread of television as a key element of spanish life they have merged with the rest of villages in certain aspects.

The remoteness from the metropolis and its location in a mountainous area justify bad communications and, in the case of La Vera, gets more complicated with its abbundance of ravines which, while being a key element in its agrarian development, are also a serious obstacle for the communication ways with the rest of the territory.

The benignity of its climate and the abbundance of vegetation might have influenced Carlos I in choosing the monastery of Yuste as the imperial retreat. The short period of his life spent there by the Emperor and the transfer of his remains to the royal pantheon was not useful to make the region known. In later times, the monastry of Yuste lost its renown and the region did not enjoy the presence of noble people nor of the economic contributions their visits could have brought. The same way, the chant to the region of la Vera composed by Azedo de la Berrueza in the seventeenth century fell into oblivion, as it ususally happens with books in this country.

Maybe because of these reasons, their own traditional ways of life in uses and customs have stayed, in La Vera, deeply rooted untill a few decades ago. This way, its tipicalities and a particular way of dealing with certain aspects of life and of expressing them, have brought the attention of scholars, especially during the twentieth century. Way before, in the last third of the seventeenth century, its lanscape and some of its villages had been described by Ponz in his trip to arenas de San Pedro from Talavera, on the east side, and to Yuste, from Plasencia, on the west side. A century later, in 1873, Pedro A. Alarcón remarked the state of abbandon of the monastery after the reform of Mendizábal. This visit also produced, in the middle of the first Republic, his chant of yearning of monarchy.

But it was during the twentieth century when intelectuals of varied disciplines busied themselves with these places and made information available from their area of specialty. Unamuno, following Ponz´s steps, went to Yuste from Plasencia and, some years later, descended to Arenas from Ávila. A night a the foot of the Almanzor made him to describe, in one of his poems, the granitic entrails of Gredos as the shoulders of Castille and at the same time evoking the greatness of Spain in Carlos I´s time.

A while later, people from the generation of 98, Azorín, the brothers Baroja and others, traveled the valley on foot from Madrid to end up their summer excursion in Yuste. Baroja, in his novel “La dama errante”, would use the notes from this trip into narrative matter, converting the itinerary used the by main characters into the one by which they escape after an attack on the king, going from Madrid to Portugal and then to England.

We should indicate that the people of 98 were not enthusiastic about popular culture. Baroja would mention comptentuously the chants and dances of youg women, at moonlight, at the ermitage of Chilla. Those songs were manifestations of a popular culture so old that it could be related with a similar Vetton custom, whose chants to the moon were already mentioned by Estrabón. It is also true that, when the 98 people passed by, nobody knew that an area, very close to the ermitage, was hiding a “Castro” of large dimensions, in El Raso (Candeleda), whose main excavations were directed by professor Fernando Fernández Gómez.

All across the region, the interest for traditional songs is strong and it still endures; no wonder it soon attracted the attention of folcklorists who, with magnetophones, travelde trhough the villages recording everything they heard Bonifacio Gil, García Matos, Angela Capdevielle in La Vera and Teresa Cortés Testillano (3) on the side of Ávila, have been some of those who inserted songs from these villages in their songbooks. Ethnologists such as Caro Baroja or ways and customs experts as Valeriano Gutiérrez Macías have described,and analized, especially the former, some of the customs of La Vera. Before, some writers from Extremadura had published descriptions of celebrations in “Revista de Extremadura y Alcántara”. Others had done so in the “Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares”. This region must have had something since, in the seventies, the founders of the magazine “Narria”, of the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions” dedicated to La Vera their first issue and that, on the thirty third, dedicated to Ávila, a good part of it was centered in exclusive aspects of the valley of Tiétar. To this region was dedicated an extra issue in the eighties, the extra issue number 75 – 76. But it not only has called the attention of writers. Also, during the twenties, plastic artists went there. Some were carried by love, as Aniceto Marinas, who sculpts the group “Hermanitos” of a anecdote from La Vera heard when he visisted the village where his wife was born.

With the brush came painters sucha as Benjamín Palencia and Martín Vázquez. The latter would bring during the forties some disciples to paint people, lanscapes and, above all, the popular architecture. The architecture of the “intricate” house of the environments of the Tiétar could not be left out of the great work of Carlos Flores titled “Spanish popular architecture”. After a lot of photos followed the rigour in the analisis and the drawing of houses, squares and corners in the work of Rafael Chanes and Ximena Vicente. (5)

Maybe, of all the villages in the southern slope of Gredos, Villanueva is the one which keeps, as something alive, a greatest quantity of traditions from popular culture. Some remember their childhood evenings when, at dusk, active games were over and, in the benches of the square, the boys got together to tell tales of incantations and mistery and, especially, terror stories such as “the half woman”, while groups of girls played, some making comedies, the other rehearsing the pastourele they would enact during Christmas time and the Epifany at church. During the winter and autumn evenings, relatives and friends would gather together around the hearth and, while grandma toasted calbotes or peanuts, the adults would shell the corn and the young ones would hear anecdotes and stories from the past. Sometimes, someone would intone a ballad, such as “the brown wolf” or “the mountain girl from La Vera” or tell de sad adventures of two orphan brothers. Whatever it was, it was always captivating. Those evenings were more more lively on the nights pigs were butchered. Men passed one to another a glass that soon should be refilled, with the new “pitarra” wine form someone. And, with the warmth of the wine, funny stories were told and, especially, racy songs were sung. A good vision of all that traditional past appears in the novel by Antonio Pérez Sánchez “the boys from Valle Nuevo” (8).

The sixties and seventies, with a very high forced emigration, signified, along with mechanization and especially, the spread of radio and TV sets, the start of the decline of a large part of oral tradition. However, it endures in some of its aspects: we refer to traditional festivals, which in the case of Villanueva is the "Peropalo", in traditional songs and in the dance of “la jota”.

Also the irruption of new technologies has helped to make some aspects of oral tradition of the La Vera region widely known. TV reports have made known the festivals of “Los Escobazos”, “Los Empalaos” and, especially, the polemic around the donkey which participates in one of the rituals, the “Peropalo” festival http://www.peropalo.es][9].

Triyng to rescue the value of that wich endures (since a half century the villages´peculiarities have been undervalued), to recuperate or at least to make known certain aspects of traditional uses and customs, a group of people, with the support of the town council of Villanueva, have started these days of celebration of popular culture wich on 2010 will know their ninth edition, with a structure that allows a varied and attractive approach to popular issues.

<> The y take part, generally, fifteen days after Easter, during a “modern” weekend (11) meaning that they start Friday afternoon and finish Sunday evening. They articulate themselves around an axis which gives them unity. They were not born with the determined structure which we are going to show you, but have, as time has passed, acquiring some features of their own which constitute nowadays their personality, to be maintained and, if possible, to improve. From being just a visual and musical sample, with a ludic and festive component based on musical folklore, has become also a serious reflection and analysis on popular culture. Besides, it is also a contact with the natural environment wich includes a certain recuperation of traditional life, as it will be shown in the brief report on the following paragraphs.

This text is a translation of the first part of a main article in Spanish