Shepherds
dents had been kept deliberately low to keep the school “at a human scale,” even if the number of applicants was now more than double the available spots.
She argued that the school’s popularity was not so much due to Spain’s near-record unemployment as it was to people’s desire for an alternative to the hustle and bustle of urban life.
Half of her applicants already have a university degree, she said.
“There is a whole new generation that wants to live differently — and these are the candidates we really target, rather than those just seeking a job,” Freixa said.
“More people believe in understanding and producing their own food, so becoming a shepherd is a choice that is courageous but also makes perfect sense for them.”
Some shepherds certainly seem to enjoy the recognition that their profession is getting, albeit belatedly.
“Until recently, the shepherd was often the idiot or the cripple in the family, the one who couldn’t do the most important farming work, but this is now a job for which you get respect,” said Armand Flaujat, who tends sheep for seven farmers during the summer months, high up in the meadows of Catalonia’s largest nature park, which are covered with snow the rest of the year.
Flaujat, however, also stressed that the survival of his job was closely linked to that of the brown bear, which was reintroduced in the Pyrenees two decades ago, using bears from Slovenia, as part of a multimillion-euro European Union environmental program called Life.
The reintroduction of the bears caused tensions with local farmers, who demanded money from the European Union to protect their livestock from the bears, and wolves, and to add mountain shepherds to safeguard their sheep.
The subsidies mean that mountain shepherds in Catalonia can earn almost 3,000 euros, about $3,373 a month; the national minimum monthly wage in Spain is 756 euros (about $850).
Freixa said that three-quarters of those who had completed the course had found a farming job, although not necessarily as a shepherd.
One, Xevi Crosas, 35, said his training as a shepherd was “a catalyst to have the courage to start my own farming business.”
Together with his girlfriend and another friend, he now produces mató, a Catalan cheese, as well as yogurt and meat from 120 sheep kept on a property that he leased in 2010. Almost half of the startup investment of 110,000 euros came from European and other farming subsidies.