Siri isn’t a very good companion on my journey to Sarrión. I’d been enjoying her mangled pronunciation of Spanish street names when giving me directions on the hired car, but once out of the city of Zaragoza, her instructions were to keep straight for 198km and she went silent. Driving through the huge empty landscapes of the province of Zaragoza towards the even emptier Teruel with not so much as a satnav voice to keep you company is a very quick lesson in just how empty rural Spain is.
Teruel is Aragon’s southern province and for the past twenty-two years, some of its inhabitants have been part of a pressure group called ‘Teruel Existe’ - Teruel Exists, which pretty much does what it says. For well over a century Teruel’s dry, rough, unforgiving terrain’s main export has been people. They have either gone to Spain’s major cities - I was once in a butcher’s shop in a village in Teruel many years ago at Eastertime and every customer that morning lived in the same area as me in Barcelona - or abroad, returning only for holidays, if at all. Sarrión is bucking that trend; a Teruelese village of 1,300 inhabitants at 1000 metres above sea level, it’s attracting its natives back from the cities and even recorded fifteen births in 2022, the only village in the whole of Teruel to do so. It’s all due to an underground fungi.
Estafania Doñate is waiting for me at the Manjares de la Tierra, a truffle shop and conservation business in the middle of the village. ‘This,’ she says pointing to the shop’s products, truffle sliced and conserved in oil, truffle preserved in brandy, fresh black truffle vacuum packed, jars of cream cheese with black truffle, ‘is what is keeping this village alive.’
Black truffle, tuber melanosporum, has always grown wild in this area but, unlike Perigord in France, it was only until recently that it was appreciated by its inhabitants. ‘My great grandparents called it the black potato and didn’t ever think much about it, but more recently we realised that not only was it an amazing product, but that here in a place where almost nothing grows is the ideal place to cultivate it.’
To grow black truffles requires a host tree, which the underground fungus can live round; in Sarrión’s case, the whole area surrounding the village over the past forty years or so has become fields of holm oak. All of the oaks start off as inoculated seedlings, allowing the fungi to grow in the root zones and they are planted and left for ten years to allow the truffles to start growing.
‘What happened here with the wild truffle,’ Estefania’s husband Marius tells me, ‘is that due to over hunting and also due to less human activity in the region as more and more people left, the wild black truffles grew less and less frequently and became harder to find, but by then we had learned how to cultivate it.’