Fuentes3

By Fuentes3

Green shoots?

On March 7th I posted a number of photos (here´s the main: https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3212456485242013014) of Valbuena, a deteriorated rural village in Cabranes. 
For context: Asturias as a whole has been relatively remote within Spain - two friends of mine in the later 1960s, wanting to get to the University of Oviedo, resorted to taking a cargo ship as far as Vigo and then taking a cross-country train. Within Asturias, Cabranes has been off the main routes, reachable by smaller roads only. 
Since the Euro-funded motorway programme was begun in the 1990s, accessibility has been much improved. I came to live here in 2008, and was early in the influx. But there were already young people arriving, many from the south,  looking for places where they could live in "green" ways. Here they became known to some as "the hippies" and to others as the "neo-rurales".  At about the same time Asturias was learning that it could cultivate more crops than it had done previously, and as well as some pick-your-own businesses, there are now commercial crops of blueberries, kiwi fruit, and avocados. 
My main photo shows a poster advertising the first ever Festival of the Aguacate (Avocado in English) of Cabranes. My extra shows a van advertising Aguacatinos, a business that grows and sells avocados, that has grown up in Cabranes and now operates out of Santolaya and Valbuena. It´s been created by Cabranes people and it´s cultivation takes place mostly in Valbuena. 
A big achievement, I think. 

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