Amagüestu

Until the Columbian Exchange, chestnuts were the staple winter food in Asturias. With the arrival of the potato they fell out of favor as the primary winter calorie store. However, they retained their position as an important part of Autumn. The celebration that now bears this name was originally an integral part of ‘laying up stores’ for the coming winter.

What was once the labor of the whole family – collecting chestnuts to store for winter food – became a celebration. A celebration of not having to scavenge chestnuts and of getting to enjoy them as a treat instead.

What’s In A Name?

Amagüestu is Asturian for toasting chestnuts. To magostar is to toast or roast something. The most common usage is to mean “to roast chestnuts outside in a drum”. When that verb becomes a noun, it is masculine, and masculine nouns in Asturian usually end in -u. Prepending A- to things is a regional pattern where some masculine words have their el smashed into them, and sounded as an a. The written El magüestu is first spoken as elmagüestu. That becomes amagüestu following the sound.

History of Amagüestu

Amagüestu being celebrated in a village

Amagüestu is a pre-Christian tradition with a murky past. In a region where every tree, river, lake, cave, and spring had its own spirit or deity, many such animist traditions arose. We do know that bonfires, communal cooking, and, of course, drinking, were parts of the celebrations from the beginning.

As Christianization spread through northern Spain, a sort of syncretization took place. The Roman cult fused with or attempted to subsume the local cults, as it had done elsewhere. In Asturias, that process was incomplete, to say the least.³ Indeed, in parts of rural Asturias, the populations essentially avoided Romanization and Christianization completely, to the modern day.⁴ One such syncretized story about Amagüestu told in parts of Asturias is that each chestnut represented a soul of the deceased, and thus each one roasted freed that soul from purgatory.

The modern Amagüestu celebration

Modern Amagüestu celebrations are held between the first and eleventh of November. In parts of Asturias bordering Galicia, the date is most likely to be the 11th (feast of San Martín).

Now, it is the name for any celebration involving said chestnuts. Every school age child in Asturias looks forward to that cold Autumn day when it is their turn to celebrate at school. Chestnuts are roasted in huge drums, and eaten out of paper cones, accompanied by sidra dulce, the lively carbonated apple must that has not yet become alcoholic. It may be the only time of the year that any celebration in Asturias contains a non-alcoholic beverage!

School children often make costumes patterned on traditional village dress from days gone by. Shepherds costumes are particularly popular, and tie the celebration (sometimes unknowingly) to the transhumance aspects of Samaín.