Equus Asinus

Part 1 of the story of a small village fighting to stop an industrial giant destroying the environment.

I count the days from Sunday 14th May, the day when my life changed here in Orxeta. Here in the silence of the Xarquer Valley. It is exactly three weeks, at 6 o’clock this evening that the dynamite arrived in my life.

I came home from doing an informal pre-inspection of the new donkey stable and other facilities of some British neighbours. They were ready for the inspection by the Consellería de Agricultura vet, in order to get their REGA papers: you must register as a ganadero (or livestock keeper) in order to keep farm animals and the ministry veterinary inspection is very rigorous. The former Vilajoiosa Conselleria vet Rafa has recently been moved to Alicante and the new vet Francisco already had a reputation that preceded him: he was very rigorous! So I went to do a pre-inspection. It was a routine thing: attention to detail, neighbours helping each other. The sort of thing we do well in the area of the Xarquer Valley.

I admired the carpentry skills of Barry: it was a beautiful stable to make two little rescue donkeys from Torrevieja very happy when they arrive. I drove home in my vintage Citroën van, noticing the fuel mix was too rich: it needed adjusting. It was a routine Sunday, and I was thinking of little things. Watering my beans would be next in the evening routine. But instead I found two young people who had just left a small paper note wedged in my gate and were about to walk back down the road to their house by the tall pines. And suddenly all routine ended and a nightmare began.

“Do you know they are going to reopen the quarry?”

I could not believe it. In 2016 I had been promised by the company Pavasal it would never open again. The Penya Negra is the great towering mass of green-black metamorphic rock, pushed up from the earth’s mantle 200 million years ago, in a unique geological migration into a settled landscape of Jurassic and Cretaceous limestone. It formed a massive hill of hard rock which became the steep side of the short fluvial valley of the Xarquer. Humanity in its various shapes, including Neanderthals, and its widely ranging cultures of Iberians, Romans, Islamics, Visigoths, and eventually an English Peasant with four donkeys who had hunted for a house that would be his final home in this life, after saving his meagre pay working in an international school in La Nucia teaching Geography, but hoping to develop in retirement his semi-serious love for a solitary life. He would slowly read the Real Academia Española edition of Don Quixote, the Life of Saint Francis, and write more articles about his thousands of miles walking the Camino de Santiago.

The donkeys allowed the Peasant to play at being a farmer while the deep silence of the location led the Peasant into depths of contemplation not possible in other places where he had lived his 73 years.  The final years of the Peasant’s life would be lived in a hobby hermitage.  After years of teaching, social work with the Church in the poorest parts of the cities, counselling for Liverpool families after Hillsborough, and yet another life… log, long ago, as an aircraft engineer in the RAF, I had finally found a place where I could be silent, only interrupted by the braying of my four curious donkeys. I was out of the cares of the world and into my fantasy land where the great towering scarred rockface of the Penya Negra was a dark but friendly reminder of the movements of the earth’s crust from the time of the prehistoric Tethys Ocean, which was the ancient parent of the Mediterranean Sea.

I had been assured by the company, in a phone call made by the man in charge of urbanisation in the Orxeta town hall, that the great green-black rock would never again be subjected to dynamite blasting, the sound of heavy industrial machinery crunching rock into gravel, or the rumblings of truck after truck, loaded up by clanking diggers and driven off down the dusty road to Benidorm with 200 million year old pyroxene to build yet more modern surfaces that cause routine flooding when the high altitude water vapour produces a devastating storm event, like the one up the road in Valencia that killed over two hundred people, little more than seven months ago. Over urbanisation is killing the Mediterranean coast.

So when Enric told me that the industrial giant roadbuilding company Pavasal had been given permission by the Conselleria de Industria to reopen the quarry and a license to mine for the next 15 years, I instantly remembered that old saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

My two young visitors had to leave because they were meeting others and a protest group was being formed. “Yes of course I will join the residents’ action group,” I said to Enric and Graciela. We were now in the same fight, for the way of life of the valley, for the rare birds in this special zone of scientific interest, the species of plant which only exists in that hill where the old quarry is, and the peace and beauty of the valley which is enjoyed by rock climbers, walkers, cyclists, and a donkey called Rubí who is the matron of the family herd that includes Morris, her fourteen year old son, Matilde her beloved dappled grey friend of pure Andalucian breed, and the pretty but entirely vain and anaemic Aitana, who I nursed back to health after laying next to her in my sleeping bag on the floor of the stable in deep winter three years ago, keeping her warm and praying to the good God who loves donkeys that she would not die.

I still have the handwritten note in Spanish that my neighbours had left in the gate: “Hello, we are Enric and Graciela, neighbours of the Casa del Pino Grande. We would like to talk to you about the subject of the quarry in front of you. I leave you here my number. Or we’ll pass by another day when you’re available. Thank you and good afternoon.” 

It was a very polite note for a very rude awakening. I have only had one night of good sleep in the three weeks since. It is precisely six o´clock on Sunday evening, three weeks later. All I do now, each day, is campaign to stop this madness. And feed the donkeys, and clean them, and love them, and look at the dark green-black stone of the quarry where dynamite will be used 150 metres from these gentle donkeys. We have to stop it.

In the next instalment: the campaign group is formed and the way this decision was made without any public consultation is discussed.

#StopCanteraOrxeta #BurritosDeLaCantera