The Alt Pirineu Natural Park will restore a wolf lodge in Lladorre, in the Pallars Sobirà, with the aim of making this heritage known to many people until now.
It is a semicircular construction that served as a trap to hunt wolves, attached to a rocky rock, about two meters high, inclined inwards and without a door. It is a building that is very close to the towns, the high mountain pastures or the huts. With the appearance of strychnine and the disappearance of wolves, this architecture was forgotten. Cristina Simó, a technician at the Àneu Valleys Ecomuseum, has been making inventories since 2005 and has already documented a dozen between the Àneu valleys, the Cardós valley and the Ferrera valley.
For Cristina Simó, sea bass is an example of the problem that existed decades ago between livestock and wolves that shared the same space. This fact led the inhabitants of the towns to build these buildings to pursue and hunt them.
The operation of these constructions was simple; inside the semicircle there was a heap; a small artificial stone elevation. At night, a live animal was tied to the pylon as a decoy. The wolf upon hearing the animal’s bells, approached the rock, jumped into the semicircle and once inside, before hunting the animal, he looked for the exit. Since there was no door and with the wall collapsing inward, the wolf could not get out and ended up exhausted from jumping trying to get out. Meanwhile, the bait was still alive, and at the point of day it was saved by the people of the towns.
The mayor of Lladorre, Salvador Tomàs, explained that the sea bass that is kept in the municipality is a sample of the “ingenuity” that the ancient inhabitants of these valleys had to be able to coexist with the wolf and minimize the damage to the herds and in the towns. For Tomàs it is a historical heritage to be preserved. The mayor of Lladorre has said that he trusts that the use given to it from now on, once restored, is only historical and cultural.
Since 2005, Cristina Simó has located eleven seabass still upright in Pallars Sobirà and she has only had news of another two through oral records or documentation. She would need to certify a dozen more constructions that she would point out that they are sea bass. In this way it has been possible to certify that it was a construction that stretched across the Pyrenees to deal with a problem that existed decades ago.
Marc Garriga, director of the Alt Pirineu Natural Park, explained that the first seabass to be restored of all those inventoried will be that of Lladorre due to its good state of conservation and proximity to an easily accessible itinerary.
Garriga has said that this restoration will be carried out jointly with the Museum of Roads and through a course of dry stone. The objective is to reconstruct the entire sea bass so that the visitor has a real idea of ??how it was done to hunt the wolf with these constructions.
The recovery of the historical and cultural legacy is part of one of the strategic lines of the Natural Park and hence the will to restore this building and recover a testimony of the presence of the wolf in these places that until the end of the 19th century lived with people in a same space.