Entrance
And beneath that immense snowfall that covered everything—the houses, the trees, the fields—the normal activity of both household and village life came to a standstill, as if in a gentle, peaceful sleep. The horses and mules remained in the stable, the livestock in their pens, the women stayed indoors keeping a good fire burning in the hearth, while the men, with somewhat less to do, turned their hands to making household utensils and carrying out maintenance work.
After feeding the livestock, the shepherd would set about fitting clappers to the bells and making a canabla (a wooden collar for livestock), as well as perhaps a bowl or a spoon for eating suet soup in the shepherd’s hut up on the mountain pasture. Those who were hunters cleaned and prepared their shotguns; others repaired farming tools. And whoever was skilled with an axe would begin hollowing out a trunk of pine, oak or walnut that had been brought from the forest some time before for just such a purpose. Perhaps a new salt trough was needed because the old one had become badly worn and eaten away by the salt.
They began with a well-sharpened axe. Blow by blow, they squared off the trunk, removing large wood chips that would later be used to light the fire. Once the trunk had been squared, the hollowing-out process began. They used the axe, the juela or adze, and another tool with a concave cutting edge known as a xiols. Once again, blow after blow, the floor became covered with wood shavings. After several days, as the snow gradually disappeared and large patches of bare earth began to show, the salt trough would finally be finished and carried into the pantry.
Rainy days and long spells of bad weather were ideal moments to stop along the way and take a break from everyday work. On such occasions, another utensil needed for the household might be made: a trough for feeding chickens or pigs, a kneading chest, a straining vessel for the laundry tub, a wooden basin for preparing dough for cakes or for making sausages and other products from the pig slaughter, a container for salt, a funnel or filler for filling wineskins or containers, or a wooden channel for carrying water. In a subsistence economy, all these objects were both necessary and essential.
The pieces in this exhibition represent both a tangible and an intangible historical heritage. There are still people alive today whose memories tell us how these objects were used and what they were used for. They bear witness to a way of life that has now disappeared, swallowed up by the deep and vast passage of time
BAGPIPE
VISITOR
What you see here is one of the key objects behind the revival of an instrument that played a fundamental role in the history of popular music in Aragon: the GAITA DE BOTO, the Aragonese bagpipe, which had fallen silent by the mid-1960s. It belonged to Juan Cazcarra of Bestué, in the municipality of Puértolas, the last bagpiper in Sobrarbe and one of the last in Aragon. He died in 1963. Around that time the instrument was acquired by Ánchel Conte, head of the secondary school in Aínsa and a councillor on Aínsa-Sobrarbe Town Council, and Joaquín Pardinilla, then secretary of the same council. It was kept at Conte’s home while awaiting restoration and a musician able to play it.
When Ánchel Conte left Aínsa, the bagpipe went to his home in Robres and from there was loaned to the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastián at the request of researchers trying to demonstrate the historical existence of bagpipes in the Basque Country. During its stay in San Sebastián, the instrument also travelled to France. Written evidence from Occitania recorded bagpipes in Béarn-Bigorre that had disappeared around a century earlier. When French researchers saw the Bestué bagpipe, they considered it to be the same type that had fallen silent there more than a hundred years before and included it as their own under the name “Bagpipe of the Central Pyrenees”.
After this long journey, the instrument finally returned to Aínsa, where you can see it today. One remarkable feature is that its chanters retain archaic, non-tempered tuning —a scale close to C—. This means that when played alongside modern instruments using equal temperament, the most common tuning system in Western music today, it can appear to be out of tune. All the sounding pipes are also covered with snakeskin, a feature found only on Aragonese bagpipes. The instrument is now owned by Aínsa-Sobrarbe Town Council.