Escartín

Last weekend I managed to do something I had been trying to do for years. After three attempts, I got to see the village that has the same surname as my great-great grandfather: Escartín. This village is 1360 m above sea level at the top of a mountain in the Aragón Pyrenees. It is a deserted village, one of several settlements in this area, which were abandoned in the sixties. Apart from the difficult living conditions in this mountainous place and the lack of resources, I think people in these villages were tempted to leave their houses for other reasons. However, I don’t really know the history of this. One thing I do know is that people didn’t live as badly as we think, even taking the obvious difficulties into account. They were used to their difficult conditions; there were even rich people and important houses in each village. In fact, I have information about two or three important families in the village and one of them actually had the family name Escartín itself.

I took the opportunity to go to the village on the first Saturday of July, when living descendants of the population traditionally meet in their village to have lunch, to visit their houses and even to camp there for the whole weekend. It was very interesting to meet with these people and we were made very welcome. They invited us to have lunch with them.

The worst part of the excursion was the difficulty in getting to the village. After four hours by car from Lérida, we had to go up a very steep little path, walking for an hour and a half. We arrived at the nearest village by car at midday and then walked up the mountain between two o’clock and three-thirty, perhaps the worst time to do so.

I don’t have any evidence about any ancestor of mine who might have lived in this village, although its name coincides with one of the surnames of my family. I only know that the family of the father of my great-grandmother was from Gavín, another little village nearby, which is still inhabited and newly reconstructed, since it was destroyed during the Civil War. Perhaps, earlier ancestors of my family were from Escartín but this question can’t be answered yet. Other oral information that I have comes from my grandmother, who said that she was invited to go up to the village when she had some relatives there that I don’t know. In the end, she didn’t want to go there since she “didn’t want to meet all these mountain people”.

The last information refers to the family of a second cousin of my mother who was born near there (in Sabiñánigo), and the family of his father had a house in the village. There was a cousin of our cousin at the meeting but he is not direct family.