Oct 8, 2016 - Los Neveros de Sierra Nevada: Historia, Industria y. Tradición .... rials and sports a useful bibliography and literature review. Early chapters ...
The AAG Review of Books
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Los Neveros de Sierra Nevada: Historia, Industria y Tradición Paul F. Starrs To cite this article: Paul F. Starrs (2016) Los Neveros de Sierra Nevada: Historia, Industria y Tradición, The AAG Review of Books, 4:4, 217-219, DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2016.1222828 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2016.1222828
Published online: 08 Oct 2016.
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Date: 10 October 2016, At: 20:16
The AAG Review OF BOOKS
Los Neveros de Sierra Nevada: Historia, Industria y Tradición [The snowfield harvesters of the Sierra Nevada (Granada, Spain): History, industry, and tradition]. Manuel Titos Martínez. Madrid: Organismo Autónomo Parques Nacionales, 2014. 277 pp., figures, photographs, footnotes, bibliography. €15.00 paper (ISBN 978-84-8014-859-7). Reviewed by Paul F. Starrs, Department of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno, NV. As the fall season looms and with it a step away from the very warmest months, the beneficence of ice and refrigeration might not be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Then again, summer brought its challenges, and shall again, especially with the specter never far away of across-the-world climate change. In the United States and much of the developed world, the use of refrigeration for the preservation of food—or just as much in the cooling of drinks and injured limbs and the recreational consumption of sorbet, ice cream, and treats such as shaved ice—are for most of us facts of life and necessities, rather than rare luxuries. Not always was it so, and this handsome book (in Spanish) captures in photographs, sketches, and eloquent text an essential fact: Through the history of human settlements in the middle latitudes, ice put in a seasonal appearance but was nothing easy to make and certainly not to preserve and transport. Yet a trade in ice and snow stored in the mountains and arduously later moved downslope to centers of population created an altogether distinctive landscape of structures, labor, travel, economies, and appreciation. In the Sierra Nevada south of the Andalusian city of Granada, famed for its Alhambra, Generalife, Albaycin, and a vast landscape of farms, orchards, and olive groves,
the 800-year presence until 1492 of AlAndalus established a culture sophisticated in its use of mountain snow. That was thanks in no small measure to the presence of twenty-three Sierra Nevada peaks above 3,000 meters, topped by Mulhacén, which rises to 3,478 meters (11,411 ft) above sea level. That massif, even today often snow-capped in August and September along its northern edge, provided a ready supply of hard-frozen water for a system of snow caves and storage cisterns where harvested snow and cut blocks of ice could be preserved and then, as demand warranted, moved to the city of Granada by teams of mules and other pack stock. This book tracks the location, history, and use (until recently) of that storage of snow and ice, and the habits and economies of those who built and used the storage sites. As the author puts it, “An interest through history in the use of snow and ice, and its technical evolution, is not simply about customs and anecdotes, but instead something that influences the field of economics and the evolution of industrial practice. . . . An obvious result is that in Granada, a ready availability of permanent snow allowed for the prompt and intense use of ice for multiple purposes: to conserve, as an aid in health and medicine, and to refresh” (p. 13). The idiosyncrasy of ice—which makes so much else possible—is a complicated geographical story that has been treated by distinguished practicing geographers (Capel Saez 1968, 1970; de Planhol 1994, 1995). Even more interesting are the implications of cooling and freezing in the preservation and consumption of food, which Elizabeth David (1994), who was both prodigious and pioneering, captured in her book, Harvest of the Cold Months. How the culture of the cold evolved is not altogether obvious to many of us, even in twenty-first-century society where foodie interest in farm-to-table production is rapt, and a
The AAG Review of Books 4(4) 2016, pp. 217–219. doi: 10.1080/2325548X.2016.1222828. ©2016 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
healthy literature exists in scholarly geographical circles about food, canning, cultivars, and fermentation. Houses such as Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California, publish literally dozens of books on food and cooking and canning and curing, reflecting a willingness to look back and recover food knowledge from our past. Cooked food is something more of the same: The noted anthropologist Lionel Tiger (1992) acknowledged the significance of cooked meats in human society, especially as a social glue and a magnet of group attraction. Cooling has less cachet. As I. D. Rowland (1996) wrote, in her review of one of David’s works, “If fire is the Promethean gift that first made us civilized, ice is a bewildering opposite; it has been tamed only by civilizations so advanced into decadence that they can warp the seasons, demanding snow in their summer drinks or ephemeral structures of pooling ice at the centers of their dining tables” (54). If pitched a bit at Trumpian levels of hyperbole, her point is dramatic enough: Techniques required to make artificial ice in industrial quantity are a product of less than 150 years; the ability to move fresh produce some distance dates from the late 1870s, but was not done with ease across a continent or ocean until 1915 or so. Transferring cooling technology to homes took time, too. In fact, widespread year-round settlements in the Sunbelt of the United States had to wait for hydroelectric power and rural electrification to spread, and only with that would come adoption of the evaporative cooler (in the arid Southwest) and air conditioning (in the humid Southeast), which brought the benefits of humandriven cooling to cities of people in the 1940s and later.
traveled those routes, legends associated with the snow trade, and in a wonderful closing note, a discussion of “El último nevero,” Juan de Dios Sánchez Morales (aka “el Jabonero”), based on an interview completed 12 June 1972. In looking at the snow freighters who moved frozen goods around, Titos Martínez has company; twenty years ago Pérez-Rejón Sola (1995) published an earlier book on the neveros, but this is a better and an updated account. Each chapter is accompanied by a wealth of full-page photographs, and sometimes by maps and sketches, paintings, and tables, that add welcome and sometimes startling detail. Snow haulers, bringing loads down from their mountain storage points, in 1915 were paid twenty-five pesetas a load; consumption was a ton or more per day in Granada, with up to thirty loads brought down daily (p. 150). Peak demand came in June, July, and August, when it was hottest, but also easiest for the arrieros to travel to and from the pozos, or well sites where the snow was stored (pp. 148–49). A municipal tax was paid by the owners of the snow storage sites, and the importance of this trade is suggested by the presence still, in Granada today, of the “Camino de los Neveros,” commemorating that “añorada y difícil”—long-standing and difficult—activity (p. 260). In the Sierra Nevada, some snow storage sites remain (Figure 1).
A thousand years before that, however, the advantages of managing mountain snow and ice were known and practiced in the Iberian peninsula, and that is the theme of this handsome collection of photographs, documents, anecdotes, and history assembled by Manuel Titos Martínez, whose prior book (Titos Martínez 2003) focused on images of the Sierra Nevada of Spain from 1500 to 1900. Some of those same images are brought into play in this copiously illustrated volume that is rich in archival materials and sports a useful bibliography and literature review.
With the rise of ammonia-based industrial cooling, and still more modern techniques using freon and its successors, it is easy to forget just how much comfort, diet, preservation, urbanization, and quality of life have changed with refrigeration. Widespread adoption of mechanical cooling, however, is something less than a hundred years old. Before that, our ancestors sweated out the hot months with relatively little respite. Preserved ice and snow were an exception to that rule, governed by geography and taking advantage of nearby mountains. Techniques for gathering, storing, preserving, and then transporting snow were developed in ancient times, and were widespread 1,500 years ago. Nor was this solely an activity around the Mediterranean Basin, although similar accounts of the snow trade exist in Italy, France, Greece, and North Africa.
Early chapters look at discussions of snow by Arab authors; the use of ice in Granada in the early Christian era; the expropriation of ice and snow by the Cabildo of Granada; and—in several chapters—the techniques and economics of snow and ice storage in the nineteenth century, as discussed by foreign travelers, workers, and muleteers. The last 100 pages are devoted to the trails that neveros or snow freighters traveled to reach the varied snow storage facilities (snow mines, houses, pools, cisterns, corrals). Of special note are artworks commemorating the people who
Of course, there are U.S. equivalents. Narratives—often large and well-illustrated books—look at the snow industry of the Great Lakes, the Sierra Nevada, and the Rocky Mountains, and at New England and the ice-house trade. The fabled Frederic Tudor, “The Ice King,” shipped ice, packed in sawdust, by boat from New England (including Walden Pond) to India to chill drinks for British officials of the Raj. Finally, in the 1870s, railroads began to experiment with refrigeration to move produce and meat across the North American continent.
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Figure 1. A covered site (pozo) for the storage of snow in the Parque Natural Sierra Mágina, in Jaen, south-central Spain. Photograph by Francisco Bruno Navarro Reyes. This volume is a reminder that, although we might rightly express concern now about global climate change and its larger implications, there has long been local interest in the importance of moderating the effects of a torpid climate. In part economy, in part luxury and pleasure-seeking, in part adventitious geography, in part hard human labor, in part an account of trade and travail, the story of snow is an old one. References Capel Saez, H. 1968. El comercia de la nieve y los pozos de Sierra Espuña (Murcia) [The commerce in snow and storage sites in the Sierra Espuña (Murcia, Spain)]. Estudios Geográficos 29 (110): 123–74. ———. 1970. Una actividad desaparecida en las montañas mediterráneas: El comercio de la nieve [A disappeared activity in the Mediterranean mountains: A commerce in snow]. Revista de Geografía 4 (1): 5–40.
David, E. 1994. Harvest of the cold months: The social history of ice and ices, ed. J. Norman. New York, NY: Viking. de Planhol, X. 1994. A story of snow: Towards an historical geography of chilled beverages. Journal of Historical Geography 20 (2): 117–23. ———. 1995. L’Eau de neige, le tiède et le frais: histoire et géographie des boissons fraîches [The water of snow, the tepid and the chilled: A history of the geography of cold drinks]. Paris: Fayard. Pérez-Rejón Sola, F. 1995. Los hombres neveros [The snowfield harvesters]. Granada, Spain: Huetor Vega. Rowland, I. D. 1996. The empress of ice cream (review). The New York Review of Books 4 April 1996: 54–57. Tiger, L. 1992. The pursuit of pleasure. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Titos Martínez, M. 2003. Testigos del tiempo: La imagen gráfica de Sierra Nevada, 1500–1900 [Witnesses of time: Visual images of the Sierra Nevada, 1500–1900]. Madrid, Spain: Ministerio de Medio Ambiente.
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