Bread and Vinegar

Even insomnia has its plusses. Being wide awake before the crack of dawn in Alfacar allows you to experience one particular sensory treat which, while not unique to this town, has a special significance here.

It is the aroma of freshly baked bread that fills the early morning air every day of the year. On bitterly cold mornings such as today, with temperatures plummeting well below freezing and a hard frost brewing that will linger through until dusk in the shadiest corners, the alluring perfume is muted by the chill. But as Spring turns into Summer, the mild still nights enable it to spread and mingle tantalisingly with the perfume of jasmine and that special blend of herbal aromas that wafts down from the hills and joyfully shouts "Mediterranean" at you.

Probably every town in Andalucia has at least one bakery, but Alfacar is different, because here there are well over thirty of them - pretty impressive when you take into account a population of not much more than 5,000. Take an early stroll around the town and you realise just how central bread is to life here. Open doors offer fascinating glimpses of floured tables and the brick-built arches of ovens, of racks and racks of loaves and a flurry of workers in white overalls, toing and froing as they load up the delivery vans that supply half the province of Granada with its daily bread. Bakeries are everywhere - there is even one in the basement of the complex that I live in!

The breadmaking tradition here has its roots in Islamic Al-Andalus, before the Catholic Reconquest of the Kingdom of Granada in the late 15th Century. Back then, Alfacar was known for the manufacture of pottery, an industry dependant on the water that rises from the adjacent hills of the Sierra de Huetor and comes to the surface in the form of several springs including the most famous of them, Fuente Grande (which, incidentally, is home to an extremely rare species of water snail!).

In fact, the name of the town is thought to be derived from the Arabic Al-fajjar - the potter's homestead. Not a great deal remains from those times, but after the Reconquest the pottery kilns were converted into bread ovens. Over the centuries the bakers of Alfacar have perfected their skills using the exceptionally pure water from the springs, special yeast cultures and wooden containers for proving the dough. Many bakeries here still use wood-fired ovens and people have come from as far afield as Japan to learn the techniques of the master bakers of Alfacar. Recently, the product has been granted Protected Geographical Status, which means that only bread produced in the town using traditional methods can be called "Pan de Alfacar".

I can't imagine what a tough life that of an Alfacar baker must be, though, having to get up in the middle of the night year round. And the hours! This year I was invited to a Christmas Eve dinner which as is usual, went on well into the early hours of the morning. My neighbour, a baker, was there and after a while he was falling asleep at the table, at which point his wife explained to me that in the run-up to Christmas, a 16 hour working day was not unusual.

The subject of bread makes me think of an amusing little anecdote that I heard not long ago. One of the Alfacar bakers, and his bakery, is called Vinagre (vinegar) and the story of how he got this rather unusual nickname goes like this. Vinegar must now be well into his eighties but when he was born, there was a vinegar seller who would go from door to door selling... well, vinegar. This local vinegar seller was particularly ugly and when the infant Vinegar emerged into the world he was not a pretty baby. So, of course, his poor mother had to put up with the teasing of family and neighbours, words to the effect that this particular tradesman had been supplying more than just vinegar to the household!