Zulueta's Cooperativa del Cadí: a Pyrenean turning point

You only need to take a step back to understand the world around you. That was my thought while listening to historian Carles Gascon, who has just presented his latest research, published on the centenary of Josep Zulueta’s death. For those who do not know, Zulueta was a prominent Catalan politician and economist; in the Pyrenees he is chiefly remembered for promoting the Cooperativa del Cadí in la Seu d’Urgell in 1915, together with the shepherds of Alt Urgell — a genuine turning point for the mountain economy.

Gascon sketched daily life here at the start of the twentieth century and, with infectious enthusiasm, transported us to the vineyards of la Seu d’Urgell — the main crop of the time before phylloxera arrived — and to the steady trickle of Pyrenean emigrants heading to the Americas. As he recounted Zulueta’s many journeys, I could not help thinking of the paradox that so many people today are alarmed by the arrival of South American immigrants, when those newcomers are the great-grandchildren of the people who once welcomed our own emigrants in the Americas.

Today they come here looking, as we once did, for a better life. Quid pro quo, as the ancients said. History is ironic: on the one hand it repeats certain chapters over and over, as if we cannot learn; on the other it reminds us that what is absent today may appear tomorrow.

They say the wine of la Seu was very poor a hundred years ago; today we produce good wine up in the hills. Some things change, others confront us with our own reflection.