I heard the word ‘trementinaire’ and it grabbed me. I had never heard of it and at the Andorra Taste gastronomic congress, where I was recently, it was evoked a few times, I stayed with it and understood it better when I talked to Patricia Pérez, a collector of flora from the Atacama desert, Chile.
Through his company, La Atacameña, Pérez offers endemic plants, flowers, seeds and roots for medicinal remedies and haute cuisine, in fact, he collaborates with chef Rodolfo Guzmán del Boragó, Santiago de Chile, who continues to receive recognition for his wanderings in the mountains of Santiago where he experiments with lichens, algae and fungi.
Trementinaires was the name given to Catalan harvesters a century ago. They were street vendors of products that they made with turpentine, the resin of red pine. It was a unique and exclusive activity in the Pyrenean valley of La Vansa and Tuixent in L’Alt Urgell (Lleida), the second largest region in Catalonia, bordering Andorra to the northeast.
Said work, according to the archives of the Trementinaires Museum, Catalonia, was born in the mid-nineteenth century, marked by the Carlist and civil wars in which the men went to fight and the women stayed at the head of the family. The first documented trementinare, in 1898, was Antonia Pallarés i Sobrè. The last ones, Candida Mojoral i Majoral, who died at the age of 101 in 2018 and Sofía Montaner i Arnau, who walked with her husband, also the son of a collector, the path of her companions, the same one of the sheep transhumance of all her life and the safest.
The first trip dates back to 1875 and the last to 1984 and was made by Montaner, who in one of his last interviews said that he preferred “to be a bird of the forest and not a bird of a cage”. He was referring to the freedom that the trade meant for the women of his generation. They went out twice a year from two days to four months. They left in winter after the slaughter of the pig and returned at Easter. They went in pairs, generally women, one older and one younger, loaded down with cans of turpentine for ointments, ointments, patches.
Each trementinaire had its recipe. Some extracted the sap from the pine, mixed it with olive oil and others made the preparations with pine rosin or pitch. For more concoctions they used bear’s ear, bloodroot, agrimony, hawthorn or king’s crown, Saxifraga longifolia, a plant up to 2,400 meters above sea level (masl) that blooms the last year of life and is ideal for hemorrhages. Among thickets and calcareous rock fissures in shady areas, at 2,700 meters above sea level, they found scabiosa or Knautia arvensis, indicated for kidney stones, expectorant, healing issues. With the tobacco plant, which they obtained in Andorra, in Spain it was prohibited, they made poultices for pain, blows, human and animal sprains.
Curanderas of a century ago preferred to go from house to house and interact with patients than to sell in the markets and get lost in the crowd. Being a trementinaire in Spain has died and the word will fall into oblivion, while in Chile indigenous people like Patricia Pérez of the lickan-antay of Atacama, with thousands of years of presence in the desert, are already training the new generation of collectors like Eva, her daughter, who already accompanies her on the tours. It is preparing to be a bird of the desert and the mountains and that will be profitable for the tribe, for Chile, because in addition to avoiding the loss of heritage, it will enrich its new generations and that is priceless.
@irmaa.aguilar (Instagram)
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