Pride and Prejudice: the Dry Stone Route

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This is the beginning of Gracía Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. This is an unlikely start for any story, but somehow it found its way to this one. The Dry Stone Route takes its name due to the countless human structures built by masterly placing limestones together without the assistance of a liquid substance to glue them. Along the trail, houses, walls, fences, castles, and the route itself floats effortlessly, almost ethereal, due to the lack of bonds between the rocks. Despite that, the abundance of limestone in this environment creates the illusion that all these constructions emerged on their own, like trees, born from the ground. Structures that have been there since ever.

But limestone was not the material of my dreams while traveling along the Tramuntana mountains. In fact, my imagination was grabbed by a more ephemeral substance: ice.

For several days on that trail, I kept hearing and reading about nevaters, men that, as far back as the XVI century, would climb these mountains and follow these same trails in order to collect and save the snow that would fall during the winter. This snow would be pressed and kept protected until summertime when it would be transported with mules and carts all the way down to Palma to be sold.

Just like Colonel Aureliano Buendía in his infancy, I was also startled by the ice. In this case, the idea of it. While looking at the sheer rock faces of the Tramuntana mountains and carrying my heavy pack under an hard sun, my mind floated back to the times when, because of the whim of a minority, a group of weather-worn ice merchants would face frost-bite and winter storms for the ice that would refresh beverages and make ice cream at the capital.