The job of the shepherd is a lonely one, and it’s been vanishing in Catalonia. But schools that teach shepherding may change all that.
AGUIRÓ, SPAIN — During the summer months, Josep Jordana, a 56-year-old sheep farmer, moves his flflock from this hamlet of just a dozen residents, perched on the Catalan side of the Pyrenees, up a dirt track to graze at higher altitudes.
He spends his days walking up and down the slopes in search of the lushest pastures, generally trying to keep his 1,300 sheep close together but occasionally needing to isolate a maimed animal or a newborn lamb and its mother.
Shepherding is a tough and solitary job that mountain farmers have passed on for as long as anybody here can remember — “at least seven or eight generations,” in the case of Jordana’s family, he said.
But steadily, as rural communities like this one are slowly depleted, that tradition is changing.
For the past four months, Jordana, who has no children, has been teaching sheep farming to Laura Madrid, 28, an unlikely shepherd, perhaps, if ever there was one.
With a master’s degree in biology, Madrid had originally planned to pursue a doctorate in her home city, Barcelona — until she decided to apply to Catalonia’s school of shepherds.
Jordana said he was still coming to terms with the idea that shepherding could be taught in a school and rewarded with a certifificate delivered by the regional ministry of agriculture. “It used to be just something that you learn from your dad,” he said.
Still, he acknowledged that without the arrival of people like Madrid from the cities there would soon be nobody willing to take over the ancestral shepherd’s crook, as well as to maintain rural traditions and remote communities like Aguiró.
“The survival of sheep isn’t at risk — because there will always be a sheep farming industry — but the values and traditions of the shepherds certainly are,” Jordana said.
From 1982 to 2009, the number of sheep farms in Catalonia almost halved, from 3,964 to 2,085, according to the most recent census. There are no offifficial statistics for the number of shepherds, but fewer than a dozen now work in the mountains of Catalonia, and most of them are nearing retirement age.
“We’re trying to maintain a generational handover that otherwise would probably no longer take place,” said Vanesa Freixa, director of the shepherd school, which opened in 2009 and is one of four such schools across Spain.
Madrid is among 14 students who this month will complete a fifive- month course run by the school.
The course starts with a month of classroom instruction, covering topics like nutrition and animal diseases. The students are then sent across the region to spend four months working alongside a veteran shepherd.
Freixa said the intake of stu-
tion, properties along Atlantic Avenue have changed hands, sometimes for millions of dollars, and small-town merchants are being forced out because they cannot pay the higher rents.
Now, along comes Boca Raton-based iPic, with its luxe theater plans and the potential for even more parking woes.
Mayor Cary Glickstein said Wednesday he was undecided about iPic throughout the process. But Glickstein said he concluded downtown Delray Beach needs to be progressive and incorporate more than just bars, restaurants and multi-family housing into its downtown.
iPic will move its headquarters to the Delray office space from its Boca Raton offices. “I’m bringing 400 jobs into my town that weren’t there before,” Glickstein said.
In addition, the theater will balance the heady mix of bars and restaurants with entertainment and office elements, Glickstein said. Having seen the rise and fall of bar districts such as Clematis Street through the years, Glickstein said city leaders needed to create business diversity.
“I don’t subscribe to the smoke-and-mirrors appearance of success,” Glickstein said, noting that Clematis Street in West Palm Beach, and Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, have had wild ups and downs, without a range of businesses to help cushion the boombust cycles.
“We have a successful town, but any sustainable downtown has to have a mosaic of uses,” Glickstein said.
But Petrolia said Wednesday she did not vote for iPic because the complex would have a detrimental effect on surrounding areas, a key criteria. The area is just too choked with traffic for the project, she said.
‘It’s all about being within the limits of what the code says we can do, and we basically ignored it,” Petrolia said.
“This has been one of the hardest decisions I’ve made since being on the commission because I wanted it,” she added.” But it’s not a good fit for that spot.”
Petrolia acknowledged she originally supported the iPic project when it was selected in 2013 by Delray Beach’s Community Redevelopment Agency as the unanimous winner for the city’s old library site. The 1.57-acre site is a half-block south of East Atlantic Avenue in the center of downtown.
But as details of the plan unfolded, Petrolia said she was alarmed by the project’s mass, and she concluded it would not work at that location.
A presentation by iPic chief executive Hamid Hashemi impressed some members of the crowd, including one attendee who said he decided to support the project after hearing the presentation.
Hashemi pointed out that movie business is strong during the summer months, when business typically slows for restaurants and bars.
Having a theater downtown could boost summer business for all downtown merchants.
The Delray iPic complex would feature 529 seats in eight auditoriums, plus office and retail space, and a parking garage.
At iPic, moviegoers can watch a movie in an oversized reclining seat, avail themselves of pillows and a blanket and order gourmet food and cocktails to their seat.
The theater company has a location at Mizner Park in Boca Raton but has been expanding throughout the country.
Delray Beach resident Bill Bathurst was another attendee who initially had reservations about the iPic plan, due to traffic concerns and the project’s boxy design. He also changed his mind to support the project, and said so at the meeting.
“Let’s not forgo the great for the perfect,” he told attendees at the meeting.
Bathurst also said he was moved by the support of two longtime city leaders, Tom Lynch, former mayor, and Tom McMur- rian, of Ocean Properties, a hotel developer based in Delray Beach. Both men spoke in favor of iPic at the meeting.
Some tweaks to the original plan were made by iPic. They include the movement of the valet to within the building, rather than having cars routed onto the streets.