• Juan's actual site: juan.perlora.eu
• Juan's blog Juan's rants.
• Juan's recipe repository The Shoddy Vegetarian.

If you know me personally, and if we speak in English, you might have heard me refer to the village of my grandmother. Well, that's Perlora for you. This is where my paternal family comes from—nothing against my maternal family, but it would be hard to refer to Madrid in the same way. Anyways, the first house on the left is where my grandparents lived, and where we spend a few weeks every summer—la maison de famille, as the being would put it. The house on the right is where my father's grandparents lived. For some mysterious reason, it is referred to as Casa Santiago. In Perlora, I am de Casa Santiago. My uncle lives just behind, hundred meters along la caleya, that is the small road in the picture. My grandfather was not from Perlora. He came from Galicia, like the majority of the Souto's that are or have ever been.

I don't remember when the picture on the right was taken, but in spite of the clouds it could well have been during the summer. Asturias is separated from the rest of Spain by a chain of pretty high mountains, and the summer heatwaves do not fare well when they cross north. People in Asturias say something similar about what happens when Asturian cider travels south. It gets sea sick, they say. La sidra se marea al cruzar el puerto. Anyways, if it is not really hot in the summer, it is also not cold in winter. Fig trees, like the one in the picture grow everywhere happily and merrily. If not, mostly apples, peaches and plums of all kinds. There are also plenty of lemon trees.

When it comes to food, there is the fabada camp, and the berzes camp. Both are stews, and while I prefer the second, the first is much more famous. Evidently, the best fabes are those you get at home. My uncle might have had the temerity of telling my grandmother that the lentils in the army were the best he had ever had, something she never forgot in spite of having lived more than 60 years after he came back from military service, but nobody dares to say that somebodyelse's fabes are better than those in one's home. Travel guides might send you to Casa Gerardo to have fabes, but I am still looking for people in Perlora who don't think that it is overrated. For my side, I am definitively more El Cubano kind of guy. If you go, order fritos de pixin, pastel de cabracho, and rollo de bonito. Now, one can discuss between this or that restaurant, but there is absolutely no doubt that you find the best ice cream is the world in Helados Helios. And yes, I have had ice cream elsewhere, in many places Italy and the US, this last being only being mentioned here because I am sure that American provincialism is going to make some people look smug and say sotto-voce something about New York, Boston, or California... Anyways, if that ice cream is fantastic, the real local sweet speciality are las marañuelas. I guess that one could call them cookies, but if in front of me you dare to refer to them under such a plebeyan name, we might be in trouble—Spain not only lost every war, but also every battle since 1572, and this means that the national pride is built on things like las marañuelas. Anyways, in Luanco, a few km further west they also make marañuelas, or so they say. In any case, you can get some in San Felix. But, as you see in the pictures, one also makes them at home, although they don't work out as well as when we all went to la panaderia de Prendes when I was a kid.