38. Popular domestic architecture 2

At right angles forming an ‘L’ with this simple cottage, there is usually a small kitchen attached, often with a flat roof and ceiling of splinters blackened by the smoke of a thousand meals cooked over an open fire. This disposition was no accident. El Hierro has, together with La Palma, the most Atlantic climate of all the Canaries. The cool, humid Trade Winds from the north and northeast are constant and quite often much more than a pleasant breeze. The ‘L-shape' provides the islanders with a sunny patio, facing preferably south but in practice anywhere between southeast and west, that protects them from the wind. The door of the dwelling most often gives on to this patio and there is invariably a masonry bench beside it for grandma to sit on. This orientation of dwelling and patio is the same whether on the northern or southern slopes of the island and is often maintained even when dwellings are clustered together.

A two storey house in the north of the island. Note the gable end and the traditional rendering of the walls. In this example, the 'L-shape' has been obscured by partial roofing at a later date and another construction in front.

Wherever possible, the islander built not on valuable flat arable land but on a slope, often taking advantage of a break or natural step in the slope. Again a slope facing roughly south was preferred and goes some way to explaining the somewhat curious way hamlets seem to have grown on only one side of the ridges. There were also practical constructional advantages: rainwater collected from the roof could be channelled round the ends of the cottage down to the water cistern which every dwelling had and was often near or under the patio. More importantly, however, a slope or naturally terraced piece of land facilitated construction and, of course, two-storeyed buildings: half the uphill wall was already there. In villages, especially on the more fertile northern slopes, where the two storey construction was formalized, windows were set in the upper storey walls and small barred ventilation openings are commonly found downstairs.

The humble building on the left, roughly contemporary with the one in the photo above, is a good example of the transition from rural tradition to urban. The patio has in some way been replaced by the alley in front and by a walled garden. There are no parapets and the tiles are weighed down with large stones. Otherwise the proportions are similar and the method of construction is the same. The addition with the stairs at the far end is much later. This house, in Valverde, could be anywhere in the islands, even in the Azores.

Quite often the patio itself was sunken, surrounded by walls retaining small fields or gardens. Although today it is often hard to discern because of the large number of recent structures, the use of sun-orientated natural slopes and sunken patios gave a pleasant and varied pattern to traditional groupings of dwellings following the contours of the land.

All that is left of a humble dwelling
in El Pinar, the door jamb and lintel,
so solid that over a very long time
even the stone walls have fallen away.

Inside there were two methods of flooring the dwelling. Fairly large stones may have been packed into place to make a rough cobbling. Alternatively, a mixture of earth and cow-dung may have been laid down and smoothed over. In the single storey dwellings, more comon in the poorer south, at about two metres above the floor a platform of pine trunks and planks formed a sort of loft where the people slept under the roof. The lower part, then, was used for everything else: storage, workshop, eating etc. Doors were invariably haar-hung, that is to say there were no hinges but the door pivoted in holes at the bottom and in the lintel at the top. The door jambs and lintel consisted of a frame of sturdy pieces of hardwood, usually Juniper, or pitch-pine, and were more important structurally than just doorframes. Internal dividing walls, if any, were flimsy partitions of split bamboo wattle or sacking. Stone dividing walls would have taken up too much space. On occasions a second cottage was added end to end giving the impression of a long construction of two rooms.

Every house had a rainwater cistern, in fact the family’s main supply of fresh water. The cistern usually had a diameter of 3.5 to 4 metres and a capacity of about 30 cubic metres, although we have a very much smaller one. It was dug straight down often through a stratum of hard basalt. The walls were made impermeable with lime and the roof crudely corbelled with large rocks. The surface of the cistern roof was finished with lime in the same way as the flat roofs and an opening was left to pull water with a bucket. Many traditional houses had in a wall facing the access to the dwelling a small niche containing wooden crosses in memory of departed kinsfolk.

Not exactly ancestor worship, but you may be forgiven
for thinking so.

Another very common feature is the bread oven, usually built quite separate from the dwelling – in any case I have never seen one with access from within the cottage as in other parts of Spain. The oven is usually a cube about 2 metres square, apparently built in exactly the same way as the cottage walls, with a flat roof and a small opening half way up and in the middle of one wall. The chamber is a perfect hemispherical void about 125cm in diameter in the centre of the construction and built with shaped blocks of conglomerate. The floor is of flat basalt flags. The fire was set in the chamber to one side and the fumes came out through a horizontal flue near the door.

37. Popular domestic architecture 3: the 'sitio'

In modern Spanish the word ‘sitio’ means ‘place’, but traditionally in El Hierro the term was used in the Cuban meaning of ‘place where someone lives’, rather like ‘homestead’ in English. Unlike homestead, however, sitio had nothing to do with political organization or defence. And like traditional architecture, of which it forms part, it responded to the needs of the family unit.

The drawing represents quite faithfully a sitio sometime in the early twentieth century. We are looking at it from a height, roughly from the south, so that the two main gabled buildings have their long side facing southeast. It had probably begun as a single dwelling a long time before, the cottage with an open door and a figure sitting on the patio bench being the first. At that time it would have been thatched. It was customary for a daughter to remain at home to care for her parents when they got too old to fend for themselves. When she married, she and her husband would have built at a right angle to her parents’ home the single-pitched thatched construction and the small lean-to kitchen in front of the door of the earlier building. One of her siblings may then have built the rather more ambitious gable-ended cottage in the foreground on a lower level and with a sunken patio. The main house and the two new cottages shared two water cisterns, one under the central patio and the other at the far end of the sunken patio. Access to the cluster was from a path on the far side, around the back of the earliest building and, to the newest, through the sunken patio.

By this time there were probably three generations of the same family living in this sitio. Next another young woman got married and brought her groom to join the fold. Up until now the founding cottage had remained a small gable-pitched thatched affair occupying only half the ground space the drawing illustrates. The new-comers built their room alongside the founding cottage, raised the height of the gables to give greater head room since the floor of the new room was a metre and a half above that of the founding cottage and gave both structures a single, possibly tiled, roof. The previous buildings used dry-stone walling but in this case the three new walls were built of smaller stone compacted with earth. Access was through a door in the gable end facing southwest, i.e. towards us.

We are now in the twentieth century with an extended family embracing four generations and there is yet another addition to make to the cluster. This time three walls, using the same technique as the most recent addition, formed a new room along the width of the gable end of the other two. The entrance was again set facing southwest and the room was given a flat roof. The occupants of the previous room on the same level now opened a door facing northeast directly onto the footpath down past the sitio. This went against traditional usage but it avoided having to pass through the new room. At the same time, a small kitchen was built beside the door, again creating the typical ‘L’ shape with a small patio on the southwest side. A new water cistern was dug in front of the door and kitchen and all the rubble was stacked up on the other side of the entrance path which now skirted the new additions. The drawing shows a shed for animals at the top of the sitio.

In what was at that time a very difficult environment – a subsistence economy with no surplus with which to buy goods – the sitio provided a physical expression of the concept of ‘family’ and provided cooperation, not only in the production of food - herding, cultivation, gathering wild plants fishing, etc. ... -, bartering, and care - of the elderly and children, of the infirm and ill - but also in the production of tools and clothing etc. In a community of perhaps a dozen adults and a horde of youngsters and children, there were weavers and shoemakers, seamstresses and tinkers, blacksmiths and carpenters, knappers and bakers ..., not professional craftsmen but people capable of providing the basics for their extended family. In addition to the basic physical sitio, its members might also own pieces of land, often at some distance away, each suitable for the cultivation of a specific crop - cereals, pulses, figs, vines etc. - or forage and pasture thus ensuring a variety of resources throughout the year. So, the sitio was an economic unit based on strong family ties and collaboration capable of providing for a considerable number of people.

13. Springs, Vegetables and Pirates

Most historical villages and towns in the western Canaries are at a considerable height above sea level, usually somewhere between 1200 and 1800 feet. El Hierro is no exception.Often they seem to follow the spring-line and this is undoubtedly true for the other western islands. But not for El Hierro. The few springs we have are only so in name: just bits of seasonally damp ground or the slowly dripping roof of rock in some overhang or cave. Perhaps for this reason, the island’s two earliest villages, Las Montañetas and La Albarada, both long-abandoned and in ruins, were within easy walking distance from El Garoé, our miraculous distilling tree, at a comparable altitude.

You may ask what, then, people did in other villages until the relatively recent advent of municipal supply forty years ago. Water for household use was rainwater collected from roofs and stored in underground cisterns lined first with wood and later with lime. 30 cubic metres per household per year.

Another reason is that the climate at these altitudes is better for settlement. It is cooler and damper and it rains more, and more regularly. This is clearly more congenial than the hot, dry coast to the agricultural settlers from northern and western Iberia. Significantly, Las Montañetas, with the island’s first Town Hall, provided the vegetables and La Albarada the meat for the island’s early settlers.
If you’re observant, you’ll notice that at least some villages must have grown on the sites of Bimbape settlements ( Bimbape: the name of the prehispanic inhabitants – more about these in a later post). But then why did they choose the site?

In my opinion the most important reason in either pre- or post-conquest times was safety. History books tell us with great relish about the attacks by more or less official pirates like Drake, Jambe de Bois, Van der Does, even Nelson. The less spectacular but almost constant and deadly incursions by pirates from the Barbary Coast of north Africa are never mentioned. You would think at first sight that an insignificant island like El Hierro had little to offer in the way of loot. But not so. Like all the other islands it was inhabited by people and slaves were the pirates’ most lucrative prize

Gadifer de la Salle, a god-fearing military man from France, visited El Hierro in 1402. In the chronicle of his voyage (Le Canarien) it would seem 400 aborigins of the island were taken captive that year but this figure is more likely to refer to La Palma. He himself, however, found it natural to capture four women and a boy while he was here. Such prizes would be sold on the European market – how otherwise would there have been interpreters at his service? After the conquest of the island in 1405 the European, Christian settlers taken by corsairs would have been sold on the Barbary Coast White Slave Market to Ottoman buyers. This trade continued into the nineteenth century.

It seems logical then to locate your villages some way from the coast, at a defendable height from which you can see advancing marauders. The villagers of La Albarada are said to have bound their cockerels’ beaks with horsehair so that the fowls’ crowing would not give their position away at night – that’s how serious their fear was! (Here, incidentally, cocks crow at night as well.)

The capital of El HIerro, Valverde, cradled between foothills at 1800 feet above sea level. You can see the breakers near the airport in the centre of the photo. On the horizon, La Gomera and further still the pale silhouette of Tenerife.