The tiny hamlet of Morillo de Sampietro stands high above a steep, wooded valley in the Spanish Pyrenees. Below is the glint of the Rio Yesa, beyond are the snow-capped peaks of Monte Perdido.
In 1860 Morillo had 76 inhabitants; by 1995 only two remained. Now there are four.
Jesús Huertas and Aina Solana, both of whom turned their back on city life to train as shepherds, live rent-free in return for saving one of the hamlet’s houses from ruin.
A few months ago they joined Morillo’s only other inhabitants, Agustín Sesé, 52, the third generation of shepherds in his family, and his partner, Sara Rosado, 42, a fine arts graduate from Gijón in northern Spain, who have lived in the abandoned village since 2014.
Chance brought Huertas, 38, a former lab technician from Madrid, and Solana, 26, who studied anthropology in Barcelona, together with Sesé and Rosado in a project where the vision is to live a simple and sustainable life in the high mountains.
They now plan to make cheese from their flock of sheep and goats; when they launched a crowdfunding appeal to finance the project, named after the Aragonese word for whey – Siricueta – they surpassed their target of €26,000 (£22,000) within a month.
“What we’re attempting here is to be sustainable and to produce something of quality,” says Sesé. “And if this is enough to sustain one or two people that would be great. I have faith in it being possible.”
There is time to breathe the pure mountain air but there is always work to do. At nine every morning, one of the four takes the 50 sheep and 10 goats out to graze and does not return home until 5pm. In summer the days are longer.
As the region has become depopulated and the land has reverted to forest, the hillside terraces have become overgrown and there are no meadows, so the flock travels for miles around the steep valleys in pursuit of food.
Aside from the flock, there is plenty to do maintaining the village and the farm. Now that they have the funds, the foursome are starting work on the cheese factory that will initially produce about 2,000kg of sheep and goat’s cheese that they plan to sell locally.
The water is free and they have solar power but, although they have few expenses, they still need to pay for gasoline and animal feed.
“Agustín and I work four or five months a year as freelance shepherds to make some money,” Rosado says. “It’s not possible to provide for four people with what we have.”
If the word sustainability has been largely drained of meaning by greenwashing governments and corporations, for Rosado and the others it is the goal, something to strive for, even if it is always just out of reach.
“There are lots of versions of rural life,” she says. “For me the most important thing is to respect the people who live here and be open to the knowledge they have and not come here like colonisers. People come here and work online but that isn’t living a rural life.”
They forage, grow vegetables, keep chickens and hunt, and now and then they slaughter one of their flock.
“In Barcelona I was a vegetarian because I thought it was the most sustainable way to live,” Aina says. “But as a shepherd I learned that it’s not a question of whether you eat meat or not, it’s about living on what you have.”
Life in Morillo is not for the gregarious. The nearest town is half an hour’s drive down a dirt road. It seems a hard life but Rosado, who has been a shepherd for 13 years, says that depends on your definition of “hard”.
“I didn’t feel good in the city,” she says. “I’ve always been a bit afraid of people and I feel better in the mountains. I like animals more than people.”
“I’m not a very sociable person, I don’t like being with lots of people, which is what the city has to offer,” adds Huertas, while Solana says she finds human interaction exhausting: “We humans think we can communicate well because we have language, but to me a lot of it’s just noise.”
They are not, however, completely isolated. The 4G coverage in the mountains is excellent and Aina is as active on Instagram as any other 26-year-old.
“My grandparents came from these mountains,” she says. “I’m continuing what they did and I’m doing it because I believe in it. The freedom I have is compensation for any of the privations. We’re bringing about a radical change in our lives, in how we consume, how we keep warm, how we relate to our environment.
“It’s a political stance. For me, this is being the guardian of the land that I live in. Here I feel that everything I do makes a positive contribution.”
