Agramaderos de Villarquemado
Agramar, according to the dictionary of the Real Academia de la Lengua, means to grind hemp or flax to separate the fibre from the stalk. Until the end of the 1950s, hemp cultivation was an activity to which most of the farmers in the village devoted themselves. The hemp was sown in April and pulled up in September; in October and November the hemp stalks were extracted, stuffed and dried, and from December onwards the shelling began.
The ‘agramaderos’, open-air stone constructions, were used for shelling. A hole was made, approximately three metres deep and two and a half metres wide. Four ropes were placed over the hole and the bales of hemp were stretched over them in order to stretch them out. The hole was surrounded by a stone wall with two holes: one for the door and the other to feed the oven with edges.
Once the hemp bales were placed in bundles on top of the well, the edges were poured through the hole in the wall in order to set fire to the hemp. In this way, the hemp is roasted. The baker, who is in charge of the oven, watches over the drying process, which lasts between forty minutes and an hour. When the hemp was toasted, each man took a bundle and chopped it with the agrama.
An agrama is a piece of wood, about 1.50 metres long, like a beam, with a channel in the middle. It must be made of thin wood and it has a jointed arm on top, with a dull iron blade. This arm was called a batojo.
Chopping consisted of crushing the stem of the plant with the blade of the agrama. This separated the edges, which fell to the ground, from the fibre. The edges were used to fuel the fire in the kiln. The fibre was used to make rolls. Once this first, rough, phase was finished, the rolls were chopped up a second time to make them into rolls. With every five or six bales, what was called a cerrada was made, and every thirty-five cerradas, approximately, bales were made, which was the product that was finally sold.
The shives were not public, but each one belonged to a group of between four and six members, and in total there were about ten shives in the village.
A statistic for 1957, contained in Santiago Sebastián’s Miscelánea sobre Villarquemado, gives the figure of 513,000 kilos of hemp harvested, which gives an idea of the importance of this crop in the town. Hemp ceased to be harvested around 1958, as it was no longer bought and was no longer sown.
It was then that the hemp sheds fell into disuse and were subsequently abandoned, until 2008, when the El Cañizar II Employment Workshop, made up of students from Villarquemado specializing in masonry and gardening, restored and recovered the hemp sheds located on the road before reaching the village from Teruel.
Today, you can enjoy a walk along this path where, in addition to observing these elements in perfect condition, you can also find out what their original use was and why they were used in this way and not in any other way, thanks to the explanatory panels on the subject that can be found along this walk through the recent history of the municipality. This also helps to recover the memory of one of the most important lost trades in this and other nearby towns.