Built Environment
The built environment of Asturias, particularly of rural Asturias, exists in a very tight relationship with the Natural Environment. Unlike the very problematic American ideas of Wilderness, Asturians inhabit a very different mental landscape when it comes to the land around them and their place within it.
Every open field surrounded by forest is a subtractive architecture. Every cluster of buildings in a remote farmstead is a constructive architecture. But neither of these, nor the market town that serves them, can escape the landscape they inhabit and become part of. No matter how remote or close a town or farmstead is, it is bound by geography. The psychogeography of Asturias is a complicated mental landscape for those of us more accustomed to the tripartite division of Urban / Suburban / Rural, and the mediating mental distance reinforced by the liminal automobile ride between each zone.
For Asturians, the dichotomy of the natural environment is repeated in the built environment. The city and the village, the cultivated and the wild, the vecinos and the montés.[1]
The City
The Village
The following dichotomy is primarily how villagers in Asturias see themselves, not as they truly are.
los vecinos
Those who cultivate the land and seek out each other's company consider themselves sociable and civilized. They comprise the communidad de vecinos; the community of neighbors.
de montés
Los Vecinos define themselves by contrasting themselves with others who spend most of their time with the animals in the wildlands and speak monosyllables or merely grunt. The shepherds,
- ↑ Fernandez, Renate Lellep. A Simple Matter of Salt: An Ethnography of Nutritional Deficiency in Spain. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2018. pp 109. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2d5nb1b2/.
