The morning consisted of a couple of visits to the two "principal" Modernista or Art Nouveau houses in the town. Both are on the Calle Mayor in Novelda. One is run by the Fundación Mediterráneo and has an entrance charge whilst the other, the Centro Cultural Gómez Tortosa, is owned by the Town Hall, so it's free, and is home to the Tourist Office. Both are pretty stunning in their detail and, every time we go, they seem to have improved their offer of things to see.
So, if the Modernista heritage was the cultural part of our visit, what were we going to get on the gastro side? Novelda has long been associated with saffron. The crocus flowers that provide the saffron originally all came from Castilla La Mancha (nowadays a lot of the saffron also comes from Iran) and it seems to be by sheer chance that Novelda became the place to process the saffron and then sell it worldwide. I have heard that, like the marble industry located in Novelda, the saffron trade owes a lot to the 19th Century railway boom. Nowadays, businesses that began with saffron have branched out into associated areas. If you buy one of those kits of "botanics" to mix in your gin, if you have a salt cellar with pink Himalayan, or black truffle salt or even if you just look at the spice and condiment section in Mercadona, you'll often find that the company that did the packing and marketing is based in Novelda. So that's where our tour guide took us next. To the LayBé factory where a small team puts saffron into nicely designed tins, worries about the ideal qualities of salt cellars and frets about packaging up varieties of paprika. There wasn't a lot to see to be honest but the talk we got from one of the owners was pretty interesting and it just shows how important marketing and image are nowadays.
Next, the bloke who'd been showing us around changed his hat from tour guide to winemaker. Apparently his family has been in winemaking, as Bodegas Ortigo, since 1880 with vineyards near Las Salinas. At one point the vineyard, and its wines, had all but disappeared, then, a few years ago, the guide and his family decided to give it another go. We got to taste the result. The white, the rosé and the red all have a bit of a twist on the typical wines produced around here. We got to do "the cata", the tasting, outside a shop called El Escaparate. It's one of those places that sells, nuts and chocolate, olive oil, salt, honey and a whole host of similar edible things in cans and jars at inflated prices. The wine was served with coques or cocas - the local variant on a pizza but only in as much as it has a bready sort of base and a topping. I like cocas but Maggie always refers to them as fat pies!
As I drank my wine I thought about bodegas selling "odd" wines, about the young woman at LayBé selling salt that tasted of fried eggs and saffron packaged in fancy little tins. The man selling his wine was passionate. Although all the businesses, the saffron place, the trendy shop and the bodega, were simply businesses, and business is easy to understand; selling things to produce profit, there was something else to each of them. People dream up new businesses all the time. Not long ago food delivery on bikes, leasing cars or the idea of selling a unique digital image would have seemed ridiculous. Nowadays they are just another business. There was something though that the businesses we'd seen and the places we'd been, had in common. The man, Angel by name, was waxing lyrical about "nuestra tierra", our land, our home, our traditions. It's the sort of thing you hear folk musicians talking about, it's the stuff of local historians, it's the reclamation of their place in history by women or by communities and by groups with a common bond. It's something that's there in the foundation trying to preserve the variety in citrus groves or the farmer herding rare breeds. It's there in the towns that depend on tiger nuts for the horchata but have found hundreds of ways to market products made from the nuts, it's the people who still make the lip balm that was developed by their great grandad for local farmers in the huerta of Valencia.
Maybe they're just another business, maybe they are simply looking for that unique selling point but I got this feeling there was more heart and passion in this than that and that it highlighted a way of doing business. Angel had sounded proud of "his" town as he showed us the houses, as he took a pride in the development of the town, as he talked about Modernista houses about the quality of the local buildings, that Modernista past, the pride in the Novelda woman who had been given the pejorative nickname of the Pitxotxa but had gone on to build up a business empire in a hostile world ruled by men.
Or maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age.
