Sergio Cela waits for outsiders leaning on his Mitshubishi Montero SUV at the entrance to the town. Under his cap you can make out in the distance a white hair that looks like cotton. He wears field pants that have already lived through his best days and a long-sleeved red polo shirt. with a pocket on the chest that lets you see the mobile both above and below.
He has a tough countenance, his skin blackened by the sun. The bushy eyebrows and glaucous eyes as sullen as curious that scrutinize the newly arrived for a few seconds, as if waiting.
– Damn, what a road, Sergio-, we break the ice
– You’ve already seen it… I already told you. This is the most important thing you have to tell.
The road, to call it something, is the sinuous road of gravel, stones and potholes that climbs up the mountain crossing oaks, pines and chestnut trees from Barjas, the main town of this Bierzo valley. Leon bordering Galicia where one feels like at the end of the world. Not a soul is seen along the way and if it weren’t for some fence, hardly a hint of civilization.
Going up to Quintela during those seven kilometers, in which partridges jump every two by three, is an exercise in risk. There are times that if one gets a little confused or catch the curve faster than the account it can end down the gorge, on the way to the Corporales River.
“They have been deceiving us for four years, I don’t know if he is the mayor [de Barjas, del que depende la aldea]the president of the council, the entire council… I don’t know. But it is a necessity. See her as she is”, insists on the Cela road as he lowers his guard.
Quintela has about eleven houses -some already abandoned-, built on limestone at different levels, and a hermitage, the chapel of San Bartolomé, which these days are being repaired. “The Council is doing it. It had to be fixed.” If it has some use it is now in summer, when former residents of the town and their families come for a few days.
Because here when autumn arrives, 27 years after his mother died, the only inhabitant left in Quintela is Sergio. “Before, in the summer, people would come and stay for 15 days or a month, but not anymore, fewer and fewer come… people are getting older,” he laments with that singsong cadence typical of speaking in the area.
It’s six in the evening and it’s starting to get cold. The thermometer marks 17 degrees when arriving at this town located at 1,003 meters high where silence reigns.
Quintela de Barjas
At first, Sergio’s huge mastiff, León, accompanies us, trying to confirm that we are not a threat. “Instead of barking at the boars, he takes care of them, he is used to them; he is an animal that likes animals,” explains this 66-year-old farmer who had never been in the city for so long until last April, when he had a stroke .
After a meal with friends, he went up to his village, and while in the car he noticed that he could not move his leg. He warned one of them – in the valley there is coverage thanks to the Movistar repeater from the imperial mount of Ogrovio that guards the village – and they rushed him to the Ponferrada hospital.
“I was hospitalized for several days, two in the ICU,” he remembers, relieved. From that, he only had a strange tingling in his left hand and the prescription to follow a diet for life. “I can eat and drink everything, but in moderation.”
The scare caught him in Quintela, but surprisingly it could have caught him at the Cannes Festival, where director Rodrigo Sorogoyen premiered his latest film, ‘As Bestas’.
For three months, at the end of 2021, Sorogoyen and his team were recording this thriller in Quintela in which Sergio has a small cameo. Just a couple of interventions of which he says that he no longer remembers the phrases he memorized: “They were short things. I was with the cows.”
“They had invited me to go to Cannes, they called me from there, but I couldn’t talk much, I was admitted,” says Sergio, who has been invited again from the production company to the premiere in Madrid in the fall. “They say that they come to look for me… they leave me a suit, but I don’t know if I’ll go. Depending on how much I want”, The rancher, embarrassed, affirms that the lowest point in Spain where he has been is in Valladolid, but long ago, “in my mother’s lifetime.”
– Hey, and how did they convince you to shoot here?
– I kicked them out many times, misappearing… ‘Don’t come here anymore’, I told María, the Galician, but she gradually convinced me. And I was very happy with them, eh! Very polite people, very good.
– But it was a lot of people, right?
– Pufff, yes… once one of the trucks that was going up didn’t have an accident by pure miracle.
– Did any of the team stay here to sleep?
– No, and some days they stayed until four in the morning recording… They went to Villafranca and there…
Sergio made good friends with Luis Zahera, the charismatic Galician actor, without a doubt now the fashionable interpreter, with whom he went down to eat “a couple of times” in Villafranca. The rancher smiles at the memory.
Sergio’s 22 cows graze peacefully on one of the town’s slopes, oblivious to the movement of various workers in the hermitage.
“They are not very sociable,” he replies when we ask him to take a photo with the cattle. Although he is already retired, he keeps them as bait. “My parents had cattle and so did I. I have lived off them”, explains reasoning why he stayed in the village. Because it was the most normal thing for him.
“A lot of people left, some emigrated to Switzerland,” remembers Sergio, who points out that he still doesn’t feel alone. “It’s just that I’m here to sleep, nothing more. I take the SUV every day.” In Vega de Seu, for example, the nearest town where only four inhabitants live in winter, They leave him bread every day.
“Be careful with that thread, I put it to lock up the cows… because if you fall I’ll laugh, hey!” warns slyly about a barbed wire at the exit of the town towards the deserted Barrosas. Meanwhile, the photographer urges him to stand on a green hillside to take a portrait of her. “I’m going to break your camera. A friend told me this morning to make myself handsome, but I was no longer born handsome,” he jokes.
Sergio has his gang, with whom he organizes feasts from time to time, and with whom he goes hunting. In the closed season last year, they killed 91 wild boars. On the hunt he leaves with his three blue griffon dogs, which “are very good for wild boar” and who sleep in a kind of pen under his stone house, which he has been renovating for a few weeks. “He needed a repair, I want to do the roof, but the officers …”, he laments about a work that seems stopped. Against one of the walls, the wood already accumulated to throw on the fire in winter.
Blackberry bushes grow on the slopes of the town’s paths and sabugueiros, the fruit of the elderberry, can be seen. “There are fewer people here of everything. Be careful with those. They are not eaten, they are very acidic,” warns about a species of very small purple berries.
On one of his lands, Sergio has sprinkler irrigation. In the valley there is no shortage of water, which falls through streams from the mountain. On the depopulation of rural Spain, Sergio says he does not know who to pay attention to.
“People say that you have to repopulate, but you have to give money, help. Here everything is the interest of money. It does not benefit whoever comes to live, but they take advantage,” ensures. Sergio refers, for example, to the 3,000 euros that he pays together with “a boy from Pontevedra” to the rest of the land owners for the use of the meadows and herbs for livestock. “The neighbors charge rent, at least we shouldn’t have to collect the rent from the meadows.”
At the foot of his house, Sergio has a garden where he plants potatoes, cabbage, beans, and some collard greens that stand out like skyscrapers. “There, in that part, I planted wheat to take advantage of the land, that’s where the people in the film made the garden and that way if I planted, no herbs would grow,” explains the rancher, that fala a bit of Galician: “But chapurreau from here”.
– And here in winter it will be very cold?
– No, here minus two at most, close to the river it is colder, down in the valley.
– And does it snow a lot?
– Not much, 25-30 centimeters.
On the roof of his house you can see the satellite dish that allows him to have 32 DTT channels. Because Sergio likes to be informed, and above all he is interested in politics. “I am a socialist, a socialist,” he makes it very clear.
– And Pedro Sánchez, what? He’s doing fine?
– …Some things are good, others are bad, everything cannot be fixed, but here we never agree with everything.
We’ve been with him for about an hour, and Sergio is already starting to get a little impatient with the camera. “Let’s go to the orchard and that’s it, eh!” Warns the shepherd, who assures that the bears are seen in the valley from time to time. “There are hives here and they have come to throw them away,” says Sergio, who has been mayor of the district for 42 years.
“I want to leave as mayor, but they won’t let me,” he laments, and then boasts about the town’s festival, “the best in the entire region”, and which will be held on the 26th and 27th after years without being held after several ” tragedies” and the coronavirus.
“There is music and we make a pulpada, but without potatoes, the traditional one, those with potatoes, that’s a hoax”says Sergio, who also explains that many people come for the festivity of the magosto, All Saints’ Day, when chestnuts are collected and prepared over a fire.
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He does not have a very good opinion of environmentalists. “They are throwing out wolves and then they don’t let people do beneficial things. There are more and more bears, what benefit do we get out of it?” asks the last inhabitant of Quintela, who after saying goodbye to us in a friendly way and before getting into the SUV, “who is 20 or 30 years old, to know”throws a reminder:
– I don’t want you to forget about the road, that section is bad, but the one from Albaredos, which is to the other side, which already borders on Galicia, you had to see that…