The Romance of Transhumance--Not!

A month ago I took part, for a day, in an ancient migration of herds from the rugged high mountain pastures of the Pyrenees to the flat and cultivated lands of the Ebro River floodplain.  I participated in the third day of an 8 day trek with a flock of 1300 ewes and 600 goats belonging to one of the herders in my study site.  He is one of only 2 or 3 remaining transhumant sheep herders in this valley, where 30 years ago every livestock owning family (almost all the households in the community) made this seasonal journey in the fall, and returned to the mountains on the reverse trek the following spring. So why did transhumance develop and persist as an important practice for so long?  Why was the practice abandoned by many herders in the 20^th century? What was lost with the end of transhumance and what could be regained by reinstating or strengthening this practice? Here I will try to give a thumbnail sketch of the history and logic of transhumance in general, and then recount what I have been learning from my conversations with many former and a few current transhumant herders in this valley.

Transhumance is a repeated pattern of seasonal movements of livestock and people, usually from north to south or highlands to lowlands.  The English term has its origins in the Spanish word “trashumancia,” with the Latin roots “tras” signifying “change” and “humus” meaning “earth”. So trashumancia is a change of earth (or territory or pastures). For centuries if not millennia, herders in many regions of Spain have practiced transhumance, guiding their herds (mostly sheep) from summer pastures in the mountains of the north and east of Spain to winter pastures on the plains in the south and west.  Some of these stock routes historically traversed almost the entire width or length of the peninsula, while others were shorter, but still often covered 100s of kilometers and entailed a month of daily movements on foot.  There is a rich body of scholarship on Spanish transhumance as this practice and the associated institution of the Mesta, an organization formed in the 13^th century to secure and govern rights over the long-distance stock driveways, have major cultural, socio-economic and political significance in Spain’s history.  The Mesta was abolished in the 1836 but many of the stock routes remain, criss-crossing the peninsula, and a recent resurgence of interest in the practice of transhumance for its cultural and ecological significance has led to new legislation protecting these corridors and drovers’ rights to use them. 

Some scholars theorize that transhumance in Spain is very ancient, dating back to the origins of domestic livestock husbandry on the peninsula, and that it basically mimics the movements of wild herbivores following the seasonal availability of forage, and associated fluctuations in forage quality (usually thought of as the proportion of protein and energy relative to fiber), and avoiding areas rendered seasonally inaccessible or inhospitable due to deep snow or cold temperatures.  In the Pyrenees where I am currently based, the summer pastures in the high mountains offer abundant, high-quality forage from mid-summer to early autumn, enabling animals to gain weight rapidly during these months.  However, by early fall the temperatures begin to drop and by late October or early November a sudden snowfall can trap animals and strand them in the mountains.  So the herders in this valley play a gambling game of sorts—they want to leave their herds on the mountains as long as possible, in order to exploit the benefits of the high quality and inexpensive mountain forage—but not so long as to run the risk of losing their flock in a winter storm and having to undertake a laborious and potentially dangerous rescue.  In other valleys the herds traditionally spent several autumn months in the middle mountains, the wooded foothills of the Pyrenees surrounding their villages, where animals grazed on lower quality forage that enabled them to maintain their fat reserves.  In this valley, however, the steep and narrow configuration of the valley and the now dominant forest vegetation precludes a longer stay at mid-elevations.  Thus the transhumant herds here move directly from the mountain pastures to the plains below, 8-14 days or more distant by foot.  On the plains, the climate and vegetation are Mediterranean, dominated by winter rains and warmer temperatures that allow active plant growth throughout the winter.  Here the grasses dry out and die in the spring, just when the mountain pastures are beginning to grow again, signaling the time to make the reverse trek back to the high pastures again.  This is the ecological and economic logic of transhumance—to exploit and adapt to the natural cycles of plant growth and weather to feed herds on natural vegetation with few or no external inputs (e.g. cultivated feed, fertilizer, etc.).  Researchers have now documented a number of other ecological benefits of transhumance, but I will save these for another post.

So why would livestock owners abandon a practice so well-adapted to the natural resources and variability of their environment, and one that enabled them to harvest natural forage at minimal cost and reap the profits by selling their fattened animals, wool, milk and other animal products? There are probably several ways to answer this question, and a full answer would entail many complex interactions at different scales.  Clearly there were larger forces of globalization and economic change at work which have affected markets for livestock products in Spain as elsewhere in the developed world, promoted more intensive (and high-investment) systems of production, and imposed a series of regulations related to animal and environmental health and food safety that make it difficult or impossible for Spanish herders to process and direct market their own livestock products (like artisanal cheese or natural lamb). Economic changes also led to increasingly intensive use of the flat lands in the Ebro River valley that constituted the traditional winter pastures for the Pyrenean herders.  More of this land was put into cultivation and less natural pasture remained, and the price to rent pasture or croplands (and graze the crops or crop aftermath in situ) increased together with the competition for these increasingly scarce resources.  So part of the economic rationale for transhumance—using animals to harvest inexpensive forage—began to disappear. 

But perhaps as important as the diminishing economic efficiency of transhumance was the human and social cost of this practice.  As an outsider I brought with me to the Pyrenees a romantic vision of transhumance as a folkloric cultural tradition apart from its economic and ecological rationales.  The archetypical image of the independent and free-roaming Spanish herder with his beret and bota (skin flask) and herders’ staff, leading his flock along an ancient drovers’ road led me to imagine that transhumance was a practice that herders abandoned reluctantly, and which they might recall with nostalgia. I was wrong.  Transhumance was a practice, at least in this region, that was employed out of necessity.  And while it required great skill and knowledge, it was also a grueling life that took a significant toll on those who were responsible for the day to day care of the flocks.  Many transhumant herders never married or had families—they spent too much time away from their home villages for this—and were often the bachelor brothers of the household.  I have now interviewed quite a few herders who were transhumant in their youth and abandoned the practice later, often around the time they decided to marry.  They describe spending the 7 months of winter (from November to May) in miserable conditions on the Ebro River plains, often living in an unheated hut, with one set of clothing they never washed, 25 km from the nearest inhabited village with no transportation but their own feet or perhaps a burro.  The social isolation and physical discomfort were great, and some herders have described how at the end of the 7 months they felt they were little different from wild beasts like the javalí (wild boar) in appearance and mentality.  One man described how upon returning to his home village in the spring, he could barely bring himself to walk down the village street in the evening, so timid and shy of other people he had become. On one occasion, he ventured out to the corner and then retreated in fear to his doorway. He emphasized that this was not his natural temperament—ordinarily he was a garrulous young man who enjoyed going out with his friends to the bars of an evening, but the months of winter isolation affected his psychological state.  When this man decided to marry in his thirties, he became one of the first in his village to build a barn on land near the village and overwinter his flock in the barn, feeding them grain and hay he purchased throughout the winter months.  It may still have made economic sense to be transhumant, but the social cost was too great for him.  He wanted to be able to live with his wife and raise his own children.  In his words, to live year-round in his home village was “going to heaven.”  This herder still takes advantage of the abundant and cheap summer pastures in the mountains from May until October, but the summer months too have been made much easier by the introduction of portable electric fences which keep the herds of different owners from mixing on the mountain commons and allow the livestock owners to live in the village and drive in their trucks to check on their herds every few days.  

So, what of the young transhumant herder that I accompanied on one leg of his journey last month?  Why has his family maintained this tradition when most of the others have abandoned it?  First, he is an extraordinary individual, with seemingly boundless energy and a great love of and enthusiasm for his occupation.  His father, now retired, was a renowned herder in this village.  This man (the son) tried to lead a different life, which his parents strongly encouraged.  He sold most of the family’s flock and became a professional truck driver.  But 6 months later he returned home, bought back his sheep, and once again became a full-time herder.  One difference in this family is that the father married a woman whose home village was in the winter pasture area on the plain.  Early in their marriage she decided that instead of staying in the mountain village alone all winter, she would accompany her husband on the annual trek to the lowlands, and rented an apartment where they could live together in the winter months, then trek together back to his home village for the summer.  For 30 some years this couple made the annual trek together, accompanied by their children, who attended school in the wintertime village on the plains and spent the summers in the mountain pastures with their father and in the mountain village with their mother.  Thus, this family found a way to overcome the social costs and isolation of the transhumant life.  The current generation benefits from improved roads and vehicles that enable the herder to remain based in the mountain village and travel back and forth to check on his herds on the plains throughout the winter.  His parents still spend the winter in the lowlands, in part to avoid the difficulties of negotiating the mountain cold and snow in their older years.  The family’s long-term relationships with landowners in the lowlands ensure that the herder has sufficient pastures and crop fields to rent each year to support his flocks.  It still makes economic sense for him to be transhumant, and he has the character and passion for the mountains and his animals that enable him to sustain, for the moment, the frenetic lifestyle of a modern-day transhumant herder.