Slow goats

I have just seen something that I still have difficulty in believing, despite having witnessed it twice: slow goat herding. Daniel Giraldo walks his flock from the Mediterranean up to the mountains. It takes him two months, when the journey could be done in a truck in a day. Why?

I met him last year on his journey home, but we were at a conference and I didn’t have much time to talk to him. So, to find out more, I have just been to the Bouillouses reservoir at 2000m in the Pyrénées-Orientales where the herd was grazing for three days.

Dani starts his journey at Vilanova i la Geltrú, south of Barcelona; at the beginning of June and arrives at his destination in the Pyrenees at the end of July. He stays there for six weeks before returning to base for the winter. Another month on the hoof. It is part of a project, the Camí Ramader de Marina (Drove Road from the Sea), reproducing a practice that died over fifty years ago.

The Camí is a multi-faceted project, drawing together municipalities along its route, literally a 300km-long cross-section of Catalonia. Perhaps the best aspect of it is that, at each stop, Dani and his two assistants initiate children into the slow world of pastoralism.

We have lost touch with traditional farming. In the past, farmers used to move their livestock to the food available. At the end of spring, goats, sheep and many more species were led from the farm to pastures green. The fields on the farm, well fertilised by droppings and thus liberated for the summer would grow fodder for the winter.

Now, farmers mostly bring food to the livestock. It is both easier and cheaper to keep the animals on the farm and transport the fodder there on trucks. The hoof prints are no longer visible on the mountains, but the carbon footprint can easily be seen.

It is true that in Europe transhumance still exists, but it is in decline and would hardly survive without government support. In Italy, at the end of the 19^th century, five million sheep went from Puglia to Abruzzo and back. Three tracks, each as wide as two motorways, were reserved for the event.  Nowadays, only six hundred sheep make the journey. It is a sign of the decline that the UNESCO declared the practice Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2023 in the hope of protecting it.

So, the continued presence of transhumance in the Pyrenees is something to celebrate. Here, on the border between France and Spain, more than one million animals climb up to the estives, the mountain pastures, each year.[i]

Naturally, living near the mountains, I have accompanied the transhumance several times and visited many shepherds in their estives. Those farmers who are based on the plain now use trucks to take the animals as far as possible with only the last few hours on foot. Gisèle Gouazé who walks for three days with her sheep from Beloc in France to Mont Rouch on the border with Catalonia, is considered exceptional.

However, Gisèle’s three-day trek is a walk in the park in comparison to Dani’s version.

A day in the life of a herd of goats

Dani’s 148 goats spend the night corralled by aluminium hurdles, just behind the Bouillouses walkers’ hostel where I am staying. When I go to see them after breakfast, the bells hanging from their necks are tinkling merrily. The day is starting well. But not everybody is contentedly waiting for the milking. Two of the young billies are facing off against each other, heads down. Suddenly, they leap into the air and make contact, their horns, foreheads and noses colliding violently. It seems as though something must be broken but they continue for two or three sickening crashes before retiring to the ringside. Luna, one of the herding dogs, approaches, apparently concerned. She barks, but to no effect. Meanwhile, some of the other billies are trying to mount the females, snorting like some monster from a primal nightmare. Ehhrhhh! Ehhhrhhhnnnn!

The billies, like most of the other goats, are a magnificent glossy black. Some of the herd have a mahogany-coloured sheen; a couple are entirely mahogany. These are variations on the theme of the Murciano-Granadina breed, from southern Spain, chosen for their milk. To one side, there are two young sevillanas, white with brown freckles. They stick together, not yet fully integrated into the herd.

One thing that all the goats share is the smell. An acrid concoction of urine and dung, tempered by musky undertones but much less sweet than the aura of lanolin that hangs over a flock of sheep.

Dani is rearranging the hurdles for milking. He corrals the goats into one half of the enclosure and then lets five at a time into the milking station. There is a rush of enthusiasm because being milked is combined with eating.

I am allowed to hinder the process, so Dani sits me down behind the rear quarters of one of them. He demonstrates, encircling one half of the bottom of the soft udder between his thumb and forefinger and squeezing just above the teat. “You have to stop the milk flowing back into the mammary gland,” he explains. Then the rest of the fingers are brought into use – like playing scales on a piano – to squeeze the milk out. When Dani does it, both teats at once, the jets of milk squirt into the empty metal pail, hissing noisily. When I do it, only drips come out. It is a stressful experience for me even though the goat seems indifferent, chomping happily. I do improve with practice, but I can see that it would be many weeks before I could make the bucket sing. Nevertheless, my bucket fills with milk along with bits of hair, grass and twigs. I pour the frothy milk through muslin into a churn.

A little later Dani shows me his pail. The milk is pink! He throws it away, grabbing an antiseptic spray. “She has cut herself,” he says.

Dani is more than willing to accept every request to be involved, and the milking is slowed down by the participation of several other adults and children. After two hours, the 85 lactating goats are done – today’s 35 litres will make 4kg of cheese.

When I say that I am useless at milking, Dani says that learning to milk is like trying to create an equitable society. It can be done but it takes a long time. In the meantime, capitalism has come along with milking machines.

The goats are now in the other half of the enclosure, and I get to sample the still-warm liquid. It doesn’t taste or smell musky, as I once thought. Instead, it is voluptuously creamy, like cow’s milk but thicker and sweeter. It is the best milk of the summer estive. Last year, the transhumance was studied by agricultural scientists, and the levels of proteins and fat here were just right for cheese, the next item on today’s schedule.

I follow Dani to his van. The dairy, in the back, is the size of a cupboard, lined with shelves laden with cheeses. It is only just big enough for the two of us to squeeze in. Dani takes the lid off a cauldron, stirs it, and then ladles the curds into moulds, leaving the whey behind. This is the product of yesterday’s milking. There isn’t much but then productivity is not Dani’s aim. “Shepherding is a lifestyle,” he says. “If you are looking at your watch, you are doing it wrong. Grazing takes the time it takes.” I am beginning to see why he is an adept of slow herding.

And grazing is the next activity. The hurdles are moved apart, and the three dogs push the goats along the GR10 long-distance trek, and into the forest above the reservoir, bells jingling.

“I put bells on the gregarious ones and the crazy ones. On the gregarious ones, so that the herd keeps together. On the crazy ones, so that I can find them when they run away.”

Different bells so that goats can also distinguish who is who. Even so, in 2023, the first year the herd came here, having bells didn’t help. The herd was scheduled to leave on the first day of the return journey, but the goats were nowhere to be found. They had escaped from the fold, encouraged by youngsters who fed them bread. They followed the group all the way to the summit of Carlit, one of the classic treks here, an exhausting full day’s climb for walkers but an easy scramble for goats. It wasn’t until eleven o’clock at night that the herd arrived at its destination, with the milking and cheese-making still to do.

Now, in 2025, the goats are eating everything within reach, except grass. They munch on rhododendrons, broom, gorse, even young pine trees. Dani pulls up a small plant and scrapes the root clean with his knife. When I chomp it, it tastes like liquorice. “They love it, and it is good for them,” he tells me.

At the end of the day, we are back at the hostel. The first event is a talk by Joan Rovira, retracing the origins of transhumance. Hunter-gatherers, he says, followed wild herds as they moved up the mountains in summer in search of food. When they became farmers, the practice continued. By the Middle Ages, the transhumance was of prime economic and political importance, controlled by kings and the increasingly powerful monasteries. The Camí Ramader de  Marina is first mentioned in a document dating to 1055 from Santa Maria de Poblet Monastery. The monasteries became rich in the Middle Ages, literally on the backs of huge flocks of sheep, wool being the most important product. The poor had to be satisfied with goats.

The second event of the evening is a cheese tasting, accompanied by wine from the Château de Corneilla, just down the valley. Six cheeses made by different methods. The first is very fresh, the cheese I saw being moulded this morning. Then there are cheeses that have matured along the way. And finally, a soft cheese like the French Saint-Marcellin. Delicious. Each represents a different village on the transhumance. “You are eating Catalonia”.

So why does Dani take two months to get to the mountains? Simply because time is not important to him. He is not in a hurry.

[i] 700,000 on the French side according to Ayphassorho et al 2018 Propositions d’évolution des mesures d’accompagnement aux éleveurs confrontés à la prédation de l’ours et aux difficultés économiques du pastoralisme Cas des Pyrénées centrales, Rapport CGEDD n° 012265-01, CGAAER n° 18059.