From her place at the foot of the mountains, surrounded by vibrant, living nature, Sarah Kleinberger-Zohn tells her entertaining stories, […]
Chapter One
Good Bye, My Dear Excavator
Goodbye, my dear excavator, and goodbye to you, Juan, and maybe see you later.
The yellow excavator was loaded onto the truck, and they are going down the hill from my house to the main road in the valley below. It was so pleasant to see you every morning while having my coffee, digging and leveling in the backyard of what will soon be a beautiful garden facing the mountains of Picos de Europa. As far as I'm concerned, you could have continued to sculpt the landscape a little longer.
Soon, the last stage is arriving: scattering grass seeds, installing a few wooden steps, and that's it. Soon.
My house in the mountains in northern Spain has been ready for several months now, and the moments in it are like a dream. But the excavator that left me reminds me that, as they say about goals in life, the process is the real essence, and certainly no less than the outcome.
I moved to my house in the mountains from Santander, where I lived for four years, after two years in Salamanca, the ancient city deep in the heart of the Spanish high plains. Even before that, I lived for three years in the Canary Islands, in Santa Cruz de Tenrife, off the coast of Western Africa, and from there I relocated by ferry to the Iberian Peninsula.
Nine years of wandering in Spain…
The story of the house began with a visit from my good friend Benny. Sometime in the summer of 2020, amidst COVID, but before the world completely lost its mind, Benny arrived for a visit with the intent of buying a house in northern Spain, in the Principality of Asturias.
Benny was living in London at the time, deeply entrenched in a giant hospital network, managing their intellectual property and its potential uses. His days were dedicated to developing international relationships and agreements between scientific and business institutions. In his leisure hours, he would occasionally browse through my posts on Facebook, which apparently sparked his interest to put a stake in the ground in this part of the world.
He followed my photos, which I usually selected based on lush greenery, nature's flowing waters, grazing animals, rural houses, medieval buildings, and other treasures and delights of northern Spain. He marked my posts with a lot of “likes”, and he fell in love. I suggested to him the important life principle of not falling in love with what you see in pictures, but it didn't help. Benny is impetuous. And so, he scoured the internet and found an English-speaking real-estate agent who marked for him several houses, precisely within his budget. He then asked me to join him for a tour of the area and a visit to these properties, since he didn't speak Spanish, and I already did.
I lived at the time in Santander, a city nestled in a small bay on the northern Atlantic coast of Spain, or as it is called here, the Cantabrian Sea (Mar Cantábrico). A short flight from London, and Benny landed at the tiny airport, just a ten-minute drive from my small apartment.
From the first morning of his visit, while we both enjoyed a breakfast of ripe tomatoes and local cheese, I felt he was already sold on the place. I could read on his facial expression that while he was surrounded by the hustle and bustle of important international activity centered in London, his gaze admired the beauty of a simple tomato.
Or perhaps it was the influence of my Facebook pictures – who knows, really.
But now, as I watch and ponder about the yellow excavator retreating from me on the mountain slope, it seems to me that it all began with a much longer sequence of events, not just when Benny arrived from London for a quick visit, but when my colleague Uzi recruited me to advise a technology company based in the Canary Islands.
***
A memory I will never forget is from when I was a young engineer in Haifa, and I had a small disagreement with a senior engineer who got angry about a mistake I found in his design. “You won't argue with me”, he said, pointing his scolding finger at me. “I've been doing this for twenty years, and YOU won't tell me there's an error”. I cringed quietly in my chair in the face of his vast experience that looked down on me, I marked the mistake on the drawing, and indeed didn't say anything more to him.
Within me, however, grew a bitter rejection of his arrogant attitude, and I silently vowed never to forget: “Never, truly never, will anyone catch me declaring that I've been doing this for twenty years straight, regardless of the subject”. Like in Rami Kleinstein's song, I committed myself to a contract with the “director of the big circus” not to spend my life in boredom. And since then, right about every ten years or so, I make some significant change, sometimes in my work, and sometimes in life. For me it’s important that there's something new and interesting entering my life.
***
In Tenerife in the Canary Islands, I started working as a consultant with a technology company, when Uzi, who managed their Israeli branch, agreed that I was a good fit for them. After several visits there, the company's founder and CEO offered me a full-time position. So, I left behind my life in the Boston area and moved to Tenerife with only a few belongings that have accompanied me since then throughout my wanderings.
I found myself living in a rented house facing west towards the sea, on the slopes of Mount Teide, in the Canary Islands, which have been part of Spain for over five hundred years.
But, since neither I nor my ancestors had any connection to the colonization five hundred years ago of the Guanche natives of the Canary Islands, nor to Columbus, who began his historic journey from the island of La Gomera that I could see from my terrace in Tenerife, I won't try to relate the circumstances that led the excavator to abandon me here in northern Spain with the famous voyage of Columbus. But the deeper I delve into my memories to discover where my house story began, at times it seems that in the end, after Uzi, I might even reach all the way back to Columbus.
After three years in Tenerife, I already knew every charming corner of the island, explored many hiking trails, climbed to the summit of Mount Teide in the center of the island, and smelled its sulfuric fumes. Meanwhile, my contract with the company ended.
My Spanish language skills had improved, but not enough. On the other hand, the desire to achieve this personal goal grew and strengthened; I wanted to be able to write and speak Spanish at least as well as an advanced newcomer. So, I decided to wander away from the island… to the half-island, to the large Iberian Peninsula, of course.
Throughout history, when people say Peninsula in reference to Spain, even though they may be standing on a small island like Tenerife, they don't mean a protrusion of land onto the sea that creates a bay, but rather, the larger half-island, the Iberian Peninsula.
When I told my friends there that I intended to move to Logroño, the capital city of La Rioja, the wine country of Spain, they shook their heads and said: “Perhaps this wouldn’t be the ideal place for you, a foreign woman, alone. One that has traveled the world, like you – the place would seem too small”. And they continued, “The area still preserves the traditional culture and customs, and in any case, it’s not the ideal place to learn Spanish”. They concluded with a recommendation: “If you're looking for a small city that will welcome you, where you could learn Spanish, go to Granada or Salamanca”.
I knew Granada from its beautiful touristic highlights, the Alhambra and Albaicín, but I also knew that it’s too hot during a good half of the year, so I decided to try my luck in Salamanca.
Enrique, my colleague at work, and his lovely wife Lorena, immediately offered to introduce me to their friend Maria Angeles, who already heard of my intentions to move to Salamanca to learn Spanish, and she connected me to her cousin Nieves who lives in Salamanca.
And this tenuous connection – cousin of a friend of a colleague – threw me into the open arms of a group of women, who entertain and help each other, and sustain a whole world that I hadn't known until then in the male-dominated tech worlds where I had spent most of my days. In the two years that I lived in Salamanca, it became clear to me that I was an interesting curiosity for these women, and that they wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be left alone in Spain. Friendships developed naturally and without much effort on my part.
***
For years, I've been living as a digital nomad, it seems. Homeless – with a MacBook, iPad, and iPhone. In the three long years that I lived in Tenerife I adopted the principle of minimalism, and I refrained from collecting unnecessary stuff. Despite betraying my adopted principle on occasion, when I left there, I managed to load everything into the car. Even the bicycle was squeezed in after I dismantled its wheels. I boarded the ferry with the loaded car, and after a day and a half on the ocean, I arrived in Huelva on Spain’s southern coast.
From there, driving on the main highways across the country, I arrived in Salamanca to the hotel located right under the cathedral and the imposing tower at its side.
When I called Nieves, the cousin of Maria Angeles, Enrique's and Lorena's friend, all I managed to understand from her was that she’d been expecting my call for a few days already. Somewhere along the communication chain among friends and cousins, it was lost that I had sailed on the ferry from the Canary Islands with my loaded car, and that I hadn't arrived by plane as people commonly do.
The next morning we met for the first time and had coffee at the hotel. When I explained that I had to arrive by ferry, she calmed me down: “Tranquila, tranquila, the main thing is that you're here, and there's no need to apologize”. Without hesitation, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work on the immediate tasks: finding a safe place for me to leave my car that was loaded with my belongings and searching for an apartment to rent.
The old town of Salamanca was so beautiful that one day of sightseeing its history and flavors was enough for me to decide it would be my next home base.
Nieves understood that I was looking for a comfortable apartment, not necessarily the cheapest, and she found exactly what I needed on the rentals website. She made contact, and when Irene arrived to show us the apartment, they exchanged familiar looks; unsurprisingly to them, it turned out they had known each other for some time.
Irene explained that the apartment belonged to her sister, Ana, and if I wanted it, her role was finished, and I should speak to Ana. From that point on, I understood that all I could do was blindly trust Nieves, Irene, and Ana and let them handle the matter, because I had long lost track of what one said to the other, and why Irene the sister and not Ana the owner showed me the apartment. I transferred the first month's rent to Ana's account and received assurance that the apartment would be ready in a month’s time when I return from my next trip. At the time we didn't even sign a single piece of paper.
And since Nieves speaks at machine-gun speeds, and she only knows one word in English – Hallo – with a throaty H, like Mandy Patinkin saying: “Hallo, my name is Inigo Montoya”, I was forced to understand her, while gritting my teeth. At the beginning of our acquaintance, I understood about half of what she was saying, but after two years, I understood everything, with almost all the nuances. And since Nieves had many stories, I had to swallow Spanish as if I were drinking from a firehose. Except for a few embarrassing moments when I arrived at a meeting place but not at the right time, I jumped into the pool, and I didn’t drown.
From my home base in Salamanca, I ventured in all directions to the main cities of Spain and the varied nature: west to Portugal and the famous Duero River with its vineyards and wineries along its banks, east to the capital Madrid, Segovia with its double decker aqueduct, and Ávila with its enormous medieval walls. I ventured south through Cáceres and its charming old town, and Seville with its bell tower, the Giralda, the Golden Tower and flamenco culture. The Guadalquivir River accompanied me all the way south to its mighty estuary and the ancient city of Cádiz that meets the ocean.
I also ventured north when I heard it was green and mountainous.
I went on these trips with occasional friends and family visitors, but more frequently with Nieves and her friends, sisters, and cousins. I got to know the Spain of resilient women, workers and travelers, far from Madrid and Barcelona, far from the tourist hot spots of Ibiza and Costa del Sol.
Aside from all this intensive travel with Nieves’s circle of friends, Ana, the owner of the apartment, also reached out to me in a way that went beyond the mundane details of monthly rent transfers. She invited me to visit her mother's farm located somewhere in the open spaces of Salamanca, an hour outside the city center. At Ana's mother's farm, her brother runs a business breeding cattle and stud bulls. During the holidays, and in summer, the entire extended family gathers there, and the children – first and second cousins – spend most of their time splashing in the front yard pool.
On such an afternoon Ana invited me to a party, and there I learned her family's story, which began with a migration southward from France hundreds of years ago. On this occasion, they also revealed to me the secret of making sausage that only the people around Salamanca know how to prepare properly. Since then, my favorite sausages come from there.
One interesting feature of Spain is that many city families, not necessarily wealthy, have a house in the countryside that remained in the family for generations, sometimes all the way back to the Middle Ages. Many of these houses were renovated, and they now serve as their vacation and holiday homes in charming village environments and vast nature areas. The trend began during the seventies with the mass exodus to the cities of young generations looking for work during the period of accelerated industrialization. Empty Spain (La España Vaciada), as it’s known, is still waiting for policies and decisions that will bring about political and economic salvation to these rural areas.
Salamanca is famous for its eight-hundred-year-old university, the oldest in the Hispanic world, and its medieval old town. Its prestige led to the establishment of a large modern university and other educational institutions and private schools for learning Spanish. The city also managed to escape the Civil War bombardments, therefore, its streets remain largely intact with their old-time glory. In the bustling student atmosphere it’s common to run into the occasional wandering medieval band playing and singing serenades.
It's a small city with vibrant life. But it has one little fault – it's green only a few months a year, and afterward, the greenery is covered in dust, just like the pines on the road to Jerusalem.
My excursions to the north reminded me that from my youth, I dreamed of living in a green and mountainous area; every trip to Mount Hermon in the north of Israel stirred in me a longing for something that I didn't have. The juvenile dream, which over the years faded from my memory and disappeared completely, was to buy a house in the mountains in Switzerland in which to pass my old age. And when asked why Switzerland, of all places, I used to say that surely my people would come to visit me there.
As someone who grew up in a dry land with few trees, greenery draws me in, and the beauty of fresh waters flowing in nature mesmerizes me. Therefore, when my wandering nature awakened, and I decided to leave Salamanca after two years, I set my sights northward in Spain.
Ana, who was living in the north at the time (which is why two years earlier she had sent her sister Irene to show me her apartment in Salamanca), offered me a room in her house in Santander, and invited me to explore the area for a few days. When I returned from the visit, home to Salamanca, I already settled on moving to Santander, because, when you live out of suitcases, everything is transient, and there's no need to overthink things too much.
It turned out that finding a long-term rental apartment in Santander wasn’t straightforward. The city cools down in the summer thanks to the sea breezes, and it boasts charming beaches. It’s a top attraction for summer vacations and a refuge from the heat for families from Madrid and the central Spanish plains. Apartment owners in Santander prefer to rent them out only during the summer months, because the income from two months is equivalent to a whole year's income from long-term rentals.
Despite the disappointment of not finding an apartment right away, Ana explained to me that this type of problem is solved through networking among friends. And there on the scene appeared her friends Christina and Martha, who knew the right people, and they found me a cozy apartment located in a beautiful area of the city, within walking distance of everything I needed, as well as the beaches and the promenade.
The beaches within the city and the surrounding landscapes are beautiful, inspiring, and perfect for both short and long walks and drives. Santander is the capital city of the autonomous community of Cantabria, sandwiched between the Basque Country to the east and Asturias to its west.
Two pilgrimage routes cross it. The coastal branch of the famous Camino de Santiago crosses Cantabria from east to west towards the holy destination of Santiago de Compostela at the northwestern tip of Spain, and Camino Lebaniego, that ends in the Santo Toribio monastery, cuts through from north to south.
Starting in April and throughout the summer and autumn months, around the central cathedral in Santander many pilgrims roam around with their backpacks, preserving the medieval traditions, with their walking sticks and scallop shells tied to their backpacks. They wander in the villages, on the beaches and side roads and they bring a light international touch to the atmosphere of the region, which primarily sees itself as Spanish to the core and not affected by excessive tourism.
Cantabria is entirely mountainous, with stunning landscapes and coastline. It takes about three hours to cross it by car from east to west, and a little less from north to south. In this entire area, there are fewer than 600,000 residents, half of whom live in the two main cities, Santander and Torrelavega. In the summer the population doubles with visitors that also fill the rural areas. Other than in the main cities, it’s almost impossible to construct houses or buildings, because the environmental preservation laws and development plans define most of the area as rural, natural, and pastureland. It's no wonder that it remains preserved, green, and beautiful all year round.
In my first year after moving to Santander, I walked at least half of the trails offered in the brochure that I had picked up at the tourist office. The highlight is the four-day route – Camino Lebaniego – which I did twice, round trip, like the book Jonah and the Boy by Meir Shalev that I couldn't part with, so when I reached its end, I turned it back to the first page and started reading again. This trail ends at Santo Toribio, the large monastery in the heart of Picos de Europa, the rugged mountain range that’s snow-capped in winter, which is also Spain's first national park.
Finally, I found my imagination’s Switzerland – the mountains, the park, and the valleys around them. What's more, it's Switzerland without the Swiss. And since Ana has an old country house here, in the valleys overlooking the park's mountains, the area has become my favorite destination for outings outside of Santander. They even set aside a room for me in their house. All I had to do was cook for them festive meals, in any style, as long as it wasn’t Spanish, and the invitations for holiday visits kept coming.
Almost without noticing I satisfied my travel yearnings by moving back and forth between Santander and the Liébana valley. And from these rich excursions, I uploaded to Facebook those photos that captured the heart and imagination of my friend Benny from London, prompting him to visit me in order to buy a countryside home.
***
To see the three houses the English-expat realtor had prepared for him, Benny and I journeyed west to Asturias, the autonomous region neighboring Cantabria, and before getting to Galicia that’s further to the west. She accompanied us only to the first house. For the other two, she sent us to see them without her guidance, because with the budget he had, one could buy houses for renovation more or less at the end of the world, but it was a trip too far for a realtor who needed to show houses all the time.
We found the village and the next house easily; it was a blue-painted house by the roadside. We were impressed by the beautiful surroundings and the captivating mountain view opposite. Since we didn't have a key, we stopped and inspected the house from the outside.
The residents of the tiny village immediately sensed the foreign presence that interrupted their routine, and to our surprise, they came out into the street. The neighbor from the house next door approached us in her apron and headscarf, and I addressed her as one would: “Hola! Qué día tan bonito!” and she replied, “yes, it's really a beautiful day”, and then she added, “and rare – because usually, we don't see the mountain across, too much mist”. The penny in my head immediately dropped upon hearing her, but Benny didn't understand our Spanish exchange, so he didn't realize that there was a penny and that it dropped. “Would you like to see the house from the inside?” the neighbor asked, and I replied with a question, “Do you have the key?”
She returned to her house and came back with the key. The entrance door creaked slightly, and although we didn't have to pass through spider webs, I felt as if we were entering the house of Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. As my eyes adjusted from the bright light outside to the darkness inside the house, I looked around and was impressed by the ancient wooden beams that still held the house together.
When she opened a window to let in some light, I immediately gravitated towards the kitchen corner, which felt like a museum exhibit, with a large, impressive iron stove and rusty cooking plates on top. Finally, I got to touch and feel a truly antique kitchen and not a modern replica that I had seen in several renovated rural houses.
Benny had to bend his head to pass under the low beams of the first floor, which was built centuries ago for smaller people, and on the narrow wooden spiral stairs leading to the bedrooms, he really had to squeeze through, and he almost got stuck.
None of this stopped him from dreaming about his grown-up children who would come to this house from all corners of the world to celebrate family gatherings with him. I watched him from the side and started thinking about how to reveal to him the painful reality of scattered families. In this, I have a lot of experience. And besides, when you're usually sitting inside a cloud of mist, there's not much pleasure for you and your family to wait for it to burn off.
I wanted to shout to him, “Benny! There's a reason why most of Spain's milk comes from Asturias. The cows love grazing here, and they don't care at all about the humidity that hangs in the air; maybe they even enjoy it more this way”. Benny continued to enthuse, and I kept watching him and refrained from any disapproving comment.
But I'm not exactly the kind to shut down a bit of joy, so I concluded that he needed to grasp the significance of his discoveries on his own. I kept my opinions to myself, and I decided to buy some time. I convinced Benny not to commit to anything until he saw and experienced for himself the area that I consider the most beautiful and enjoyable in northern Spain, namely the Liébana Valley around Picos de Europa, the area I knew well from my frequent visits to my friend Ana and her partner Lorenzo.
Benny agreed, and I called Lorenzo, who lives in the area most of the year. I asked him to connect me with real estate agents because “a friend from London has come to visit and he wants to invest”. Without hesitation, Lorenzo invited us to visit him, and when we arrived the next evening, we spent a leisurely time in his old house, enjoying cheese, sausages, and wine. In the morning, he took us to see properties in several villages in the area.
With Benny in the front passenger seat and Lorenzo leading the way, we saw what Benny thought was too big, followed by a property that was too expensive, and another one with a limited view. Then we reached the last stop on the tour, which was an elongated plot of land with a dilapidated ruin of stone and brick at its end, which is called cuadra in these rural areas.
The vast forests across northern Spain are interspersed with expansive grassy meadows intended for grazing livestock – cows, sheep, and horses. These green spaces are called prados, like the name of the famous museum in Madrid situated on land that was once a pasture.
When the cows finish grazing and there's no more grass in the low pasturelands, they are led uphill to new grazing areas, continuing like this until the arrival of winter, when they descend back to the valley to eat fodder. To protect them from wolves and foxes along the journey, they are gathered at night into stone-and-brick structures that are scattered at different heights: they’re called cuadras in the lowlands, chozos up high in the mountains, and invernales in mid height for the occasions when the snow arrives before the herds are safely back home in the valley. In these structures, the shepherds and the sheepdogs rest from their duties and warm themselves on the second floor, while the animals enjoy the inn on the first floor.
This used to be the process before agricultural industrialization. Here and there, in rural roads, you might need to slow down and drive according to specific traffic rules because a herd of cows is changing homes, in spring going uphill and in autumn downhill.
Nowadays, most cows are transported to upper mountain pastures in specialized trucks, and when they're being corralled for loading onto the truck, it's not advisable for tourists to be around, especially if there are restless calves that are loaded separately into smaller stalls. When my pregnant daughter visited the area, she couldn't bear hearing it. Seeing mothers being separated from their offspring and hearing their cries, even though they're cows and calves, is tough to witness.
As most of the grazing cows are transported to upper pasturelands in trucks, the landscape of northern Spain is left dotted with unused herding structures across the hills and green spaces. Many of them are filled with agricultural debris, and from a distance, they look like tilting stone ruins about to collapse, with no access roads leading to them.
Such was the cuadra at the edge of the field that we stopped to see, even though on its other side it bordered a cluster of houses rather than more pastureland.
Lorenzo released the latch and gently pushed open the door, and thus, with the help of the phone’s flashlight, I got my first glimpse inside a cuadra. We could discern in the darkness the water trough on the right and the hay tubs on the left, and through the cobwebs, we could see the thick beams still holding the structure upright. There were also some scattered stones, mud, planks, as well as broken furniture and remnants from other buildings.
After glancing inside, we circled around the ruined building and trudged through the dry grass to the small field behind. I stood more or less in the middle of the rectangular area, surveying my surroundings. To my right was Lorenzo, and to my left Benny, who immediately remarked that the view was beautiful but not what he was looking for. As if he were drawing a painting of a landscape to his liking, he said that he would’ve preferred to see the sea peeking in between the mountains.
Meanwhile, above Lorenzo's head to my right, I saw the high mountain, Peña Sagra, and ahead the unmistakable ridge, Picos de Europa, looming over the edge of the valley that was spread below us.
Just out of curiosity and idle thoughts, I asked Lorenzo: “How much are they asking for it?” He quoted the price the agent had told him and confidently added that it could be negotiated down significantly.
And then, still standing and gazing at the panoramic landscape, I diverted my thoughts completely from my guest, Benny, and engaged in conversation with myself as I rummaged through my memories: “Isn't this what you dreamed of in your youth? Here's Switzerland right before you, and it's affordable to anyone interested!”
***
Still longing for the yellow excavator that left me a week ago, again I think about the origin of the story that led to my home somewhere in the mountains of northern Spain, and I realize it's even older than I thought. It didn't start with the visit of my friend from London which guided me to a breathtaking landscape, nor with Uzi who sent me to Tenerife, and certainly Columbus is not to be blamed.
Now I think it began years before, on the day I decided to learn Spanish because I needed a distraction from a clash with my boss in the company where I worked in the Boston area. The situation was so hard that I felt trapped and helpless. Throughout the day, I had to present a strong appearance, complete and in control, because otherwise, it's impossible to manage an organization with hundreds of employees. On the way home, alone in the car, I collapsed inwardly and cried. So it went day after day for quite some time.
In my vocabulary back then, I didn't have the insight to ask for help. I dug deeper and deeper in my thoughts until I decided that my brain demanded a break and a diversion. During trips to and from work, I played tapes in the car of an English course, at a level spoken with intellectual pride at places like Oxford, and at home, I joined my teenage son who was practicing for his homework of Spanish language conjugations.
The pedantic English from the tapes and the beginner's Spanish lessons were the lifeline that saved me from that depression, and they still help me up to this day to keep my head above water.
And so I come to the conclusion that the Spanish language, which today allows me the pleasure of chatting with neighbors at the end of the street, must be the far end of the chain of events that led me here. It also clarifies for me how, when I saw mountains and green valleys in northern Spain, I succeeded in navigating in my imagination and seeing Switzerland from the dreams of my youth.
But in fact, it’s not only my imagination – it truly resembles Switzerland, not the urban center of Zurich, but the green countryside. At the main junction in one of the villages here called Mongrovejo, I stood one day with other tourists to read the sign that’s depicting Heidi, The Girl of the Mountains. It was her and none other! Immediately I thought, “what would the story of my childhood favorite Heidi be doing here if it’s not Switzerland?”
When they wanted to record a movie series about her, they found the valley and mountain landscapes of Liébana to be the most suitable. In its simplicity and humility, the area here is more akin to the Switzerland of yesteryear than today's glamorous version.
***
So, when I stood with Benny and Lorenzo in the dry-grass field with the cuadra at its end, and saw Switzerland with my own eyes, I decided to settle here. Also, because it had been more than ten years since I began wandering; the time had come for the final significant change in my life.
Lorenzo fulfilled his promise and secured me a tempting deal. Two months later when the sellers and paperwork were ready, I returned for a meeting at the notary's office to sign the documents. At the end of the bureaucratic process, we went downstairs to have coffee, all the sellers and I, and for the sake of the historical selfie picture, we removed our COVID masks and turned our backs to the mountains so they could serve as a fitting backdrop.
After chatting and drinking coffee, and when all the rituals were behind us, I asked Lorenzo to take me to visit the place, because I wanted to see again the plot of land I bought for myself. I understood from him that there was already an architect in the picture who had measured and checked in the regional records, and what he found would allow me to build a small rural house in the footprint of the cuadra that stood there.
A two-story house, one in place of the cows, and one in place of the shepherd, and no more. “Maybe we’d manage to steal a meter from behind if we dig into the mountain”, that's what he said. “And all the area behind?” I asked. “It's a separate parcel, and it's defined as agricultural land, “rustico” – at most you could arrange a garden for yourself”, replied Lorenzo.
As I was digesting the information that fell on me and beginning to get used to the idea of a cute cabin in the mountains, like Heidi's, I noticed there was another one, another cuadra standing just below us. “And what about that one?” I asked Lorenzo. “Just another cuadra”, he said. “Don't worry, no one will build a skyscraper here to obstruct your view. Does it bother you?” he asked. “Bother? No!” I said. “I just wanted to know if that one is also for sale”.
His surprised reaction said a lot (one day I'll ask him what he was thinking at that moment), and he said, “let me check to whom it belongs”. And since I already grasped some of the rules of the game here, and also because I wanted to impress him, I said: “But we need to check if it's rústico or urbano”.
To buy the additional plot, it was necessary to scour through documents at the notary’s, the town hall, the land registry, and to find five heirs, all long-standing citizens of multiple generations, and persuade them and their spouses that after dividing the loot, each of them would be left with something worth more than a shared ruin in the mountains that they would never utilize. It also required digging through boxes of papers in the living room of one of them to find the papers documenting the death of their mother, who was the actual owner, and to ensure there was no will dividing the property differently than into five equal parts.
None of this would have happened without Lorenzo, who showed me the value of the patience of a soldier who once fought terrorists in the Basque country, and about that I'll tell more in a later chapter.
At this point, the architect, Máximo Diaz, whom everyone calls Jim from childhood, started to get excited. For him, it wasn't just another cabin in the mountains, but rather, a chance to build something serious and express his architectural aspirations. I asked him to build me two small houses, one for me and one for guests, and he exclaimed: “Under no circumstances!” And already he was showing me on his computer screen the dream house he had designed, complete with a small bridge above the service alley between the two existing structures, and above it a large living room overlooking the views from all directions.
To get approval to build the bridge above the alley, Jim went to the land registry (catastro), and from there he came back to me with new excitement: the alley is jointly owned by the two existing structures: “Yes, the alley also belongs to you, Señora Zohn”.
And in order to understand if the alley I won in the lottery could be part of my future home, I would need to learn another chapter in rustic-urban regulations. Just because the area is defined as urban doesn't mean I can build on it as I please, up to the construction percentage limits. Here we enter the realm of conservation regulations that only allow building within the boundaries of the old structure. But since the alley was meant to serve two independent structures that stopped being independent as soon as I bought them both, it was allowed to enter the house and serve as the main entrance hall.
I returned to the notary's office for another procedure, and another round of coffee between these sellers and me, the buyer. I'm sure they were wondering whether I'd end up buying the entire village.
Then, I waited patiently for months while the authorities collected their purchase taxes, and Jim sketched, computed, and prepared lists. There was still a long road to travel for the construction permits to be issued.
With the initial cost estimate done, I needed to choose a main contractor. Jim recommended his cousin, of course, who is one of three local contractors. The second presented an expensive offer, and the third, José Javier Vilda, made the most economical proposal. Lorenzo told me that Vilda, as everyone here calls him, specializes in restorations; he builds no more than one house at a time, and therefore, he promised, I'd receive personal and special attention.
We met for lunch with Jose Javier and he seemed like a good guy to me.
Even though they showed me several houses he'd built, I had no way of assessing the quality of his work. At this point, I already understood that without Lorenzo's help, I had no chance of navigating through all this confusion. So, I decided that if Lorenzo wanted Vilda, that's how it'd be.
In any case, I knew, initial estimates in a construction project are, at best, but very early estimates. Even if they bind the proposal in a leather binder, with many dividers, their number multiplies and the leather becomes thicker with use. And in my project, prices went up for electricity, iron, concrete and ceramics. Everything went up, with the exception of my wallet.
And that’s how I'd reached a point where there was an architect, initial planning, a main contractor, and even a friend like Lorenzo, and we all waited for building permits whose timing, according to all the experienced parties involved, no one could predict. Around the corner obstacles awaited me like a global pandemic, a truck drivers’ strike, shortages of building materials, and dysfunctional government offices.
Amidst all this, I managed to travel to London to visit my grandson, but I couldn’t return; London closed its skies, limiting flights to citizens returning home. And I, the digital nomad, could only return to the countries I really didn't want to go to in those months.
I stayed in London, known for its grayness from the outside and color from within. But when the museums, theaters, squares, markets, and restaurants are closed, only the gray remains, the parks seem faded, and happiness is only what one can create deep within the family.
And so months passed, and when I almost forgot that I owned a plot of land in northern Spain, the permits were finally granted, and construction began, while I enjoyed it only through WhatsApp messages and photos exchanged between me and Lorenzo.
And now, two years later, as I pedal on my stationary bike in the gym that I built for myself, with the most beautiful views, and the memories of the yellow excavator that has long since departed, I read Yigal Sarna's A House in Portugal, and on every page in his book I find echoes of my own story.
He was forced to flee our country for a very clear reason – his published opposition to the political establishment; and I, it seems, have been fleeing all my life, though it’s not so clear from what. For him, like for me, there are green fields and water, grazing animals, stone ruins and debris, old, deserted weavers’ looms and spinning needles, and above all, a culture that, at least to us, seems simple and tranquil.
Every morning, every day, I am delighted by the friendly greetings of the neighbors, in a corner of Europe that is as far away as possible from greedy Putin who’s stirring the cauldron of wars. This is the comforting texture that envelopes Sarna in Portugal and also is the essence of my life in Liébana. For all this goodness I say a little thankful prayer.
My Spanish friends still ask me from time to time about Tu Amigo Benjamín. With his budget, and with a loan from the bank, Benny ended up buying an apartment in the Canary Wharf towers in London. And now he complains that he has no profit left from the investment. Impetuous – I already said that. And when I send him pictures of the house in the mountains that grew meat on its bones, he says, “And to think I was there, even before all this started!”
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