Esparto - from shoes to baskets

If you've ever seen people in Alicante or Murcia dressed in traditional clothes, you may have noticed that they are wearing rope-soled shoes. Before I moved to Spain, I'd have called them espadrilles. Here, they are called alpargatas. They are made from esparto grass which, like hemp or sisal, can be woven and sewn to make numerous everyday items. Once upon a time ordinary people wore alpargatas all the time for everything form climbing palm trees and working the earth to dancing at fiesta time.

I have a friend who, often, when we go somewhere new, asks me how people who live or lived in that place make or made a living. Usually I guess that it's web design or selling insurance or running a bar, just like everywhere else but even if I have a better answer it can seem unlikely. We're in some forgotten village in Teruel in front of a gigantic old house, palace-sized and the answer is that all that money came from sheep. Hmm, a likely story. It's true, though; wool generated huge amounts of wealth in lots of Spain for hundreds of years. Surrounded by shipyards or steel furnaces, it's easy to believe they are wealth generators, but not everything is so visible. Were you to stroll the streets of Mountain View, California, could you feel the place wallowing in cash because of Google?

If you live around here, you are not far away from some esparto. It grows all over the place in the countryside. From our house, we'd have to walk all of 200 metres up the track to our nearest biggish patch, but there are probably odd clumps closer. In the past, large areas were given over to esparto growing. It was harvested by wrapping the plant's stalks around a stick and tugging. Damaged stems were discarded at that stage. Next, it was dried in the sun, traditionally for forty days, until it turned a golden straw colour. Oddly, having taken all that time to dry it out, the next step was to wet it again so that it recovered flexibility. There seem to have been two different methods, I presume for different types of products. In the first, the grass was wetted for a couple of days before it was worked. The second method, which seems almost antithetical to me, was to soak the grass in tubs of water for the same count of forty days that it had been left to dry. Apparently, the water smells horrid after a while. The wetted grass was then beaten with a mallet, that looks more like a heavy wooden rolling pin, against a tree trunk in order to separate the fibres of the grass. Like its two-day wetted cousin, this crushed esparto could then be woven into different plaits or braids. The braids, always made of an odd number of strands, usually between three and nineteen, were then sewn together to give the correct shape. As a simple example, imagine a round mat to go under a hot dinner plate to protect the table. A coil of plaited esparto will be coiled around in a single flat form. The capachos or capachetas, which are the mats used in old-style olive presses, were made in much the same way - they're capachetas on the carts in the photo. A current day supplier lists fans, snail collecting baskets, cheese making hoops, targets, all sorts and sizes of baskets, saddlebags, nesting boxes, bottle holders, shoes, cord and string in their product list.

Esparto was a big industry around here, a big employer, a big generator of wealth. Unlike the wine or the almonds or even the olive oil, esparto has been overtaken by synthetic materials. There are museums in both Cieza and Jumilla dedicated to esparto. The one in Jumilla, as a part of the wine museum, says that at the height of the industry, between the First and Second World Wars, there were six esparto factories in Jumilla. Nowadays, the use of esparto is much less mainstream and you'll usually only see it in craft markets or during demonstrations in ethnological museums and the like. Mind you, if you need to pack a window or door subframe or you need to hang a suspended ceiling you can still buy bundles of it from the DIY superstore Leroy Merlin.