Marina Vilalta holds a lamb and watches the sheep grazing on a hillside, their bells ringing softly in the breeze. The photo provides a startling contrast: This lamb is just eight days old; Villalta has lived for more than ninety years.
At 96, she is considered the oldest shepherdess in Spain, and almost certainly the most dedicated. She has been caring for sheep on and off since she was five years old, leaving her home in the Catalan mountains near the French border only once in her life.
Keen to experience air travel, she flew to Mallorca. But after getting up at 5am to catch a flight, she visited the cathedral, had lunch and then went home so she could herd the sheep the next morning.
As we stood together on a hillside in the village of Bruguera, where she takes her sheep for feeding each day, she suddenly broke into a song about a sailor wooing a woman who “could be Queen of England.”
Villalta is one of the last keepers of a dying country tradition like this song. The way she cares for her sheep, treating them almost like beloved pets, has nothing to do with modern industrial agriculture.
Her life is celebrated in a new book, life in the mountainsgo through Abraham Oriol, a journalist. He also recounted how oral traditions such as country songs died out as dwindling populations deprived villages of their lifeblood.
He told how 100 years ago Bruguera was home to 300 people and 1,000 sheep. Today there are only 40 residents, plus Vilalta’s 36 sheep and 6 goats.
As life became more difficult and there were fewer shepherds, Virata sold sheep and lambs, belonging to disappearing breeds, to local butchers.
According to Eurostat, there were 13.6 million sheep on Spanish farms in 2023, down from 15.5 million in 2019.
Falling prices for mutton and lamb have made it more difficult for shepherds to make a living, so many have turned to other jobs. Viralta’s only child, her son Jesus, and her grandson both work in construction.
The nonagenarian, who is physically and mentally quick, says caring for her sheep makes her happy. “It can be difficult in rainy or cold weather. But I feel fulfilled when I take care of them,” she recalls.
Viralta lived in Bruguera in a comfortable house with low ceilings and a warm fire that could only be reached by a dangerous mountain pass.
She takes her sheep to graze for two hours every day – even at Christmas. “When I go out, I can see the sheep and the flowers,” she said, when the prospect of retirement was mentioned mildly. “I never liked staying at home.”
When we take the sheep to graze, she doesn’t need help walking. But she did need a ride to the hillside 10 minutes away because her legs weren’t what they used to be.
Viralta was born in 1927, one of 12 children in a poor family that sometimes had to sell some of its children to relatives when there was not enough food.
She told how when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the police came looking for her brother who was fighting for the Republican Army. “[One brother] Hidden under false floorboards. A National Guardsman pointed a pistol at my mother and demanded. The other fled to France,” she said.
“Before the war, things were very difficult. We had no shoes, no clothes and no one to go to school.”
After the war, she worked in a factory for a while but returned to herding sheep when the herd reached 1,000.
“Sometimes I would drink goat’s milk when I was hungry,” she recalls with a smile.
In this hilly region of Catalonia, Vilalta’s generation speaks almost no Spanish. During General Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, her sons and daughters were forced to learn Spanish, while Catalan was banned in schools.
Villalta’s late husband, Sebastià, worked a series of odd jobs while she tended the sheep.
As a shepherdess working alone, she received sexist comments, which she ignored.
“People would ask her what her husband was doing and make crude jokes about how she was almost a man,” Oriol told i.
She was awarded the Cross of Saint Jordi, Catalonia’s highest honor, for her contribution to protecting rural culture, but she refused to travel to Barcelona to receive the award, insisting the weather was too hot. So the mountain had to come to Mohamed: Catalonia regional president Pere Aragonès traveled to her home, a two-hour drive north of the Catalan capital.
“Marina’s story allows us to broaden our horizons about the rural world and the popular wisdom of our country,” said Oriols, who works for Spanish regional television channel TV3.
“We talked about empty towns, the shepherds who are no longer with us and the changes in mountain life. “
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