ONCE UPON A TIME, a sow suffering from rheumatism made her way to a strange green pool among the holm-oaks, as unhealthy-looking a pool as you can imagine, and wallowed there in the viridian slime that covered the bottom : let’s call it mud. Her medical attendant, let’s call him swineherd, had experimented with every curative concoction he could think of but none did any good. Evidently the sow knew something he didn’t, returning to the pool day after day, bypassing the crystalline waters that threaded through the dehesa. (The dehesa is the countryside in the lower ground round here, with holm-oaks and very often cork oaks growing in the grasslands, well-spaced as in the park of a great 18th century house, intensely beautiful, with plentiful acorns for pigs). Well, the sow, as you realized from the start, dear reader, surprised the swineherd by throwing off her rheumatism. Some say she became quite frisky.
Human beings followed where the swine had led and discovered that the waters of the pool and specially the mud, when slapped on liberally, had just the same effect on them. Not only did it cure their aching joints, it made their skin as smooth as any baby’s bottom – no matter how terrible the skin disease they brought to the bright green waters. The pool, it turned out, was fed by an underground spring so it never dried out, even in the fiercest summer. The place is called El Baño de la Cochina, The Sow’s Bathing Pool.
Do you feel like a trip? asked Fernando, he of the cork oak stripping (post: 31/7/2014) and meditation on landownership (post 28/5/2015). It’s no way, just a few kilometres south of Villasbuenas?
He and his wife Rosa were taking us on a little trip, along with a daughter (ours) and her small children, to see spring flowers in the dehesa. No hesitation: off we went, Fernando and Rosa in the lead car, ourselves behind in a vehicle loaded down with baby-seats.
First stop was the bridge over a stream in the village back-country where Fernando often fishes. It has rained hard here in the past few weeks, banishing our normal fear of drought, at least for a little while, and the water was fairly pelting down. But we could see dark shoals of barbel in the broad reach below, nose to tail, scores of them, hundreds, lying in the peaceful shallows over gravel, laying their eggs Fernando said. It was an exciting kind of bridge and a real surprise to find so many fish. The three year-old rushed up and down while the toddler staggered about joyously. The fish waggled their fins and occasionally made little darting movements at high speed.
The flowers were already profuse, but once we had turned south from Villasbuenas the roadside itself was so intense you almost needed dark glasses for the yellow: corn marigolds galore and tolpis barbata – the first with specially tender yellow at the centre, the latter with a big, dark eye in the middle. There was the purple of viper’s bugloss – not quite in the broad swathes I had been hoping for – but purple enough. We came to a wooden signboard saying Baño de la Cochina and turned down a dirt road towards a reservoir lying in the valley, spreading out along the fingers of lesser depressions where streams led into the reservoir: not ‘fingers’ in Spanish, but ‘colas’, tails, quite large pieces of water, though the reservoir itself is small as they go.
Right beside the wall at the edge of the reservoir there lay a strange oval depression full of water, not as green as we had hoped for but appreciably darker than the waters of the reservoir itself, which, being brimful, had invaded the pool.The pool was rimmed with stone, with ring after ring descending into the water like seats at a theatre or, more appropriate for these parts, a Roman arena – for sitting on beside the water as the level drops, come warmer days and nights. Just now it’s definitely on the cold side, air and water, too, but the children were up for it. The one year-old wanted to be dangled in the water but soon opted for total immersion, plunging his face right into it, coming up with an astonished expession morphing into a broad smile. The three year old, who has up to now been the official water-baby in the family, was a little reserved at first but eventually went for total immersion too.
There is a signboard at the site telling the story of the sow and the wonder cure. It’s written in proper Spanish and Portuguese, with a computer-translated English version speckled with errors. This claims that hundreds of people now come here to ease their troubles. Fernando confirms this – though not in May, of course. There are a couple of restored buildings by the Baño, closed down at present, and you can imagine somebody selling cold drinks in summer. But there’s absolutely no analysis of the minerals in the magical waters, so presumably the hundreds find faith and its results sufficient.
For me,the Camino days are coming soon, with a two week walking-tour to lead along the Pilgrims’ Way to Santiago de Compostela in the north of Spain, scene of plenty more miracles. As you can imagine, I am in training – which is to say, going for a few walks round home. I drive back to the Baño de la Cochina the day after our visit to get a closer feel of the countryside and walk the six kilometres to the village, there then back again. That should be enough. I suppose I enjoy the trees most this time round, the wide, wide spread of holm oaks, with glimpses of the reservoir here and there and the vividness of the flowers to delight in. There is the yellow of course, masses of it, a thick sprinkling of pale mauve too, all the way along, the head high heads of thistles – (Galactites tormentosa?) and plenty of light pink Silene colorata standing among the corn marigolds – I am a real amateur where flowers are concerned but a botanical friend of ours once did a private picture-book of local flowers and this is my infallible – I hope – work of reference.
Sheep bells tinkled among the rise and fall of the grazing ground beneath the trees and from time to time I could hear the voice of the golden oriole, most piercingly sweet of bird calls. Last year was the year of the hoopoes, an abundance of these bright-crested birds with their erratic black-and-white barred tails in flight, always away from you. This year, to judge from yesterday’s walk and the ringing calls from the wood above our own house, seems likely to be the year of the golden oriole.