El Sequero

The weekend has past however the good news is that I'm still at "El Sequero", the bad news is that Maria Jose and Nicol aren't here. One has gone to visit customers and the other is attending her end of course camp, I'll let you figure out who is doing what. So I'm home alone for the week, well actually not quite alone, Indy is with me.

So what's new on the farm?

Firstly a year after asking the local blacksmith, for a quote to but bars on the "windows" of the real sequero, they have finally come to the party. Now if anyone needs to poke arround they 'll need to jump the fence, this means only the more athletically inclined or the down right persistent will be able to get in and have a look around.

While on the subject of the real sequero, I've applied to the local council for a permit to have it re-roofed, the beams are rotting away and one day it will come down on someone, it's only taken them two months to send someone down to verify my claims. They arrived this morning, mumbled something about the paperwork being inaccurate but agreed that the roof was unsafe. Whether this is enough for me to get the permit or whether we have to go and speak directly with he mayor, which is how most things get done here, only time will tell. When Einstein said that time was relative, he had local municipal authorities in mind.

So why do I call it the "real sequero" and what am I actually referring to? If you take a look at the topographical map of the property, which I posted last week, you will see that there is a structure in the bottom left hand corner. This structure is a small building of about 90 square meters.
This building was used to dry tobacco leaves and in Spanish the word dry is secar which when converted to a noun becomes sequero. So when I mention the "real sequero" I'm referring to the building in the lower left hand corner of the property.

This photo was taken in 2006, the last and only time it has snowed in Candeleda for the past 40 years!



We have taken the name and use it to refer to the property in general and our house in particular. It is not I might add a particularly novel choice, the area around Candeleda is known for it's tobacco plantations and also for the paprika plantations. Both plants go through a drying out process which explains the plethora of sequeros peppered (I couldn't resist that one) throughout the countryside.


In fact the term sequero has such a close links to the area that the local council choose it for the name of the recently restored tourist information center, the fact it was an actual sequero probably had something to do with and not just a case of copy cats, as my daughter would have you believe. To be fair, our real sequero is a concrete structure, about 50 years old, the real thing is generally smaller and made of rock or mud bricks and much older.



So now you know why I distinguish between "el sequero" and the "real sequero".