La Finca Los Tres Alcornoques: Our New Pueblo & New Home

La Finca Los Tres Alcornoques

View from Our Bedroom

We woke up on the next day in San Vicente de Alcántara in the region of Extremadura on La Finca Los Tres Alcornoques (Three Oaks Farm), bursting mostly with curiosity, but with a little hint of “What have we gotten ourselves into?”  In the light of day, our room was still quite skeletal and about as homey as a monk’s ascetic chamber.  And it still smelled funny.  We rolled up the metal grill that covers most modern Spanish windows (keeps out the light and therefore the sun, which is very important when it is 100 degrees outside and you don’t have air conditioning) and saw the view from our bedroom window.  The terrain looked surprisingly like the Carmel Valley!  I guess more like the Sierra Foothills with the dry grass, hills, fox gloves and large boulders.  The main difference is that instead of being spotted with scrub oak trees, this land was spotted with cork trees!  Cork trees are really a type of oak tree but the bark is spongier and when removed it’s fabricated into wine corks!  Oh, and the famous Iberian Blackfooted Pigs whose cured meat is arguable the finest in all of Europe?  In order to qualify as one of Iberia’s finest, the pig must gain at least 20% of their weight from billotes (cork acorns) alone!  We were told that our arrival time would coincide with cork harvesting season so of course we were excited to see the process of tree bark to wine bottle cork.

We crept our way up to the kitchen, found some sliced bread and guinea hen eggs and made some breakfast.  Have you even had a guinea hen egg?  The little suckers have shells so thick that you have to bash them on the counter several times just to crack the dang thing, but once it is in the pan then on your toast over easy like, those orange yolks and firm whites are one of the best eggs you will ever eat!

After breakfast, our hostess, Brin, came in asking if we wanted to go into the pueblo with her; she had to run an errand and then pick up her daughter from school.  We were curious what the countryside looked like and of course the pueblo itself so we hopped in the car and headed into San Vicente.

It had been six years since I left Barcelona after living there for almost two years so I was excited to exercise my very much out of shape Spanish.  After doing a little shopping, (sunscreen, shampoo, soap, etc.), we met Brin and the first victim of my Spanish, an older gentleman named Ilario, at a little bar next to her daughter’s bus stop. 

Blood Sausage

Many Spanish cities are getting away from the tradition of serving a free tapa (plate of small bites) with every round of drinks; however, thankfully San Vicente is still a firm believer in snacks with drinks.  Brin clearly stated that if a San Vicente bar decided to stop serving free tapas, the people would riot and the bar would be shut within a week!  Seriously, I’m not sure how these bars stay open anyway…charging $1.50 per glass of beer, wine, or Fanta Limón plus snacks, where do they make their money?  Don’t get me wrong, the tapas aren’t super fancy or anything: chicken wings, chunks of meat on the bone with french fries, sliced blood sausage, salted fava beans, little chunks of stewed rabbit in sauce, etc., but having said that, the locals appreciate their tapa when sipping a cold beer, and expect nothing less. 

This particular day, as confirmed by our bar mate, Ilario, the tapa du jour was pig snout and “smile muscles” slow cooked with lots of paprika (as we quickly found out, paprika and meat are the main ingredients of traditional Extremaduran cuisine).  The soft yet firm texture of the pig snout cartilage (love!) brought up a conversation about the nutritional value of cartilage and skin, which is primarily what we were eating.  It is the opinion of the PigWizard, that combined with a diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables and a fair amount of exercise, there’s is no need to perpetually avoid the delicious pig or chicken skin “cause it’s so bad for you.”  Guess what?  SKIN IS NOT FAT!  There is a layer of fat under the skin which is virtually rendered out when the meat is cooked properly, leaving you with the substance people pay millions of dollars per year to have injected into their lips, cheeks and chins: collagen.  Bottom line, eating skin is not necessarily bad for you but in fact adds collagen to your body and increases the health of your skin!  (NOTE:  this statement has not been proven by the FDA, especially in reference to particularly fatty birds such as duck and geese.)

Beer+Lemonade=Clara

After a couple of beers and tapas, we headed back to the finca for the, “lunch”, the large midday meal flowing with wine, beer or the refreshing clara (half beer & half lemonade), traditionally eaten at 3:00 pm, and followed by a siesta (nap) before heading back to work.  In our case, since we had not yet started work, after a lil siesta we followed Brin on a tour of the finca.

As we wound our way through the finca, over fences (very few gates actually opened), we realized an underlying theme: the whole place was jury rigged, few permanent solutions (remember the zip ties that held up our shower curtain), mostly temporary fixes, using the odds and ends that lay in random disorganization around the finca to essentially put out the current fire and move on to the next problem.  For my husband, a man who thrives on finding a clever yet permanent solution to any mechanical, structural, architectural problem, the place was truly an emotional roller coaster of kid in the candy shop and a hellhole of frustration.

Borris the Burro

The Pig Domain

Anyway, back to the tour of the finca.  Down a couple of stairs, through a gate, over a fence lived the first set of geese, kept in an enclosure meant to limit their exercise in order to fatten them up, but still give them plenty of room to scurry about as the emotionally fragile and flighty goose will do.  Past the vacant poly tunnel (green house), the huerta (vegetable garden) and a massive coil of lengths and lengths of busted piping, we then met the sheep, four baby black sheep, one black mama, two white females and two white males.  Their bunk mate was the beast that turned out to be my bestest, most favorite buddy on the farm: the white, big eared, fuzzy nosed, moody burro (donkey), Borris.  We moved on to what I came to call the Pig Domain which housed two half Iberian Blackfoot-half mutts.  Although the Iberian Blackfoot pig is historically a mutt breed, these two managed to retain the necessary gene that produces the iconic black toenails that distinguish them as proper Blackfoot pigs. At any time of the day, these two happy pigs could be found lounging in the shade of their huge boulders or splashing in their concrete piggy swimming pool.

Downstairs Chickens

The Moronic Guinea Fowl

On to the “downstairs” chickens, the name given to the chickens kept at the bottom of the hill on which the finca sits.  Approx 12 free range chickens, including a breed sans neck feathers (kinda u-g-l-y!) and 4 roosters (Brin was convinced two were gay as they had not been able to produce any fertile eggs when penned with her best layer).  Housed with the chickens was another gaggle of about 10 geese, ruled by one great beast whose gray and white feathers were arranged on his body in a manner reminiscent of a boa flamboyantly wrapped around a ham.  Caged in the corner of the “downstairs” chicken pen were possibly the stupidest beings ever to scatter the face of the earth.  Jonathan told me turkeys are so dumb that they will attempt to romantically pursue a wooden stick as long as it is topped with a dead or fake turkey head.  Guinea fowl are unarguably dumber.  As you approach the enclosure, they frantically launch their little heads through the bars of their cage attempting to escape while conveniently failing to remember that the last time they attempted this escape method, they were thwarted by their huge bodies that no way fit through the holes in the cage!

Cosmo the Kitten Stalks Sam

After the “downstairs” chickens, we moved on to the leghorns, yes, as in Warner Brothers’ Foghorn Leghorn.  Eight beautiful, bountiful egg laying, pure white chickens with red heads.  The leghorns’ neighbors were housed over a fence, past one of the four finca wells and a heap of odds and ends and surrounded by God knows what.  They are the sweet faced blond and brown bunnies: 16 babies and 6 adults, two mamas with litters on the way.  Gooshie, cuddly, squishy, baby bunny faces!  Following us on our tour were the two sweet and loving finca dogs, Marta and Filly (short for Filamina).  As the weeks progressed, Marta followed me everywhere whether I was feeding this animal or that animal or just dropping into the kitchen for a snack…puppy love!  Also imminently present around the perimeter of the house were archenemies, Sam, the lean, beautiful, gray, cross-eyed, jealous cat and Cosmo the scruffy, sweet, scrappy, hard-knock kitten.  Cosmo never tired of provoking Sam despite the hissing and kitty death-threats.

"Keep this mangy kitten away from me!" - Sam

As she showed is the lay of the land, Brin told us a little bit of history of the finca and their ownership.  Ten years ago, she and her husband were living in Brighton, England when they decided that their dream was to own a small holding of animals and farmland so they packed their bags into a van destined for Spain in search of more affordable land.  On the last day of their trip they found La Finca Los Tres Alcornoques, which came stocked with sheep so they promptly sold their house in Brighton and purchased the finca for 1/5th the price of their house.  For the next 8 years, they went back and forth with the San Vicenten builder, whose access was limited to rural Extremaduran tools and skills, trying to explain their ideas for a more English style house.  This turned out to be quite a feat, especially given the traditional Extremaduran mind set of building the way they've always built and why would you want to do anything different?  Despite their communication breakdowns and conceptual differences, they managed to build the addition to the original house, which included a pool, the main kitchen, and what was ultimately meant to be a rentable apartment with separate kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, where we currently slept.  

A couple of years ago, when Spain fell into "crisis" Brin's husband lost his job in San Vicente and was forced to return to the UK to work.  Needless to say, there has been no money for renovations on the finca much less to complete the apartment, hence the light fixtures hanging from the walls and the zip ties holding up the shower curtain.  The total disarray of the house and surrounding animal enclosures, random materials piled up around the finca with the intention of use someday made a little more sense to us.  For the last year or so Brin has been relying on HelpX for some relief from single-handedly running the 4 hectare (9.88 acre) finca and raising a strong-willed, headstrong 7 year old.  Boy to we have our work cut out for us!