La Chaquetía

Monday was All Saint’s Day (Día de Todos los Santos), naturally a national holiday here. Everyone visits family members’ tombs to lay flowers and then goes out to the country for the Chaquetía. Levi and I had no idea where we were going or what we were doing, but we accepted an invitation from Antonio Juan, a teacher at my school, to tag along with his family. He and his wife Monica both speak good English and use both languages with their children, two boys of four and seven and a little girl of less than two. The kids don’t understand much English but they speak it fairly well, and we had a good time on our drive out of town listening to a bilingual treatise on the wonders of Playstation and Pokemon.

We drove about fifteen minutes out of Zafra through the lovely Extremaduran countryside and parked in a field between two farms, both marked by ancient stone walls, from behind which horses and cows observed us curiously. We unloaded folding tables and chairs, soccer balls, frying pans, and a feast of roast chicken and fries. After a good long while and an impressive quantity of matches (and quite a lot of help from Levi), the little boys finally got a fire started and we all sat down for a really absurdly large meal, washed down with plenty of wine. Later on, Monica’s parents, sister, and brother-in-law joined us. The frying pans, it turned out, were for roasting chestnuts over the campfire until they puffed up and burst open enough to be shelled and stuffed into dried figs to make casamientos, a regional snack. I ate approximately 893789 of these. We passed the afternoon kicking a soccer ball around, petting the horses, and enjoying the last of the summer sun.

Later in the afternoon, Levi and I went on a little hike with Antonio Juan and the kids through one of the farms. This is the kind of farming you don’t see much in the United Stated anymore. Cows, sheep, and goats roam open pastures and enormous Iberian pigs are given free run of large pen and sty complexes. No factory farming here; free-range is the norm, and these animals are afforded comfortable and open-air (albeit ill-fated) lives. The whole tranquil scene is ornamented with Spain’s ubiquitous stone walls and grayish-green olive trees and set against the backdrop of the low, misty extremeño mountains. It’s a truly beautiful place, this strange, lost-in-time corner of Europe we’ve found ourselves in.