With a wheel in hand and non-stop molding pieces, he feels like a fish in water. Pottery was what destiny had in store for this forty-five-year-old Canguesa, granddaughter, daughter, sister and niece of potters from Llamas del Mouro, a small town of 25 inhabitants, located in Cangas del Narcea, southwest of Asturias. There, her family, and now she, works with black ceramics, a tradition that has centuries of history and whose pieces, production and uses speak of a very remote part of Asturian culture. The Lamas del Mouro produced escudiellas, cups, botijos, jars or caveros, with a fundamental and main secret, which is the cooking time, because it is what guarantees its characteristic black color.
Verónica Rodríguez comes from a family of potters, she learned the trade directly from her grandfather when she was six years old and since then she has done nothing else.
Llamas del Mouro and Faro, a small town in the municipality of Oviedo, are the last two potteries still standing and in production in Asturias. There were several, in Miranda (Avilés), Pola de Siero, Cangas de Onís or Villayón, but none of them survived the passage of time or found anyone who wanted them.
That is why it is not easy every day to meet someone who is passionate about one of the traditional Asturian crafts and who has all the strengths necessary to guarantee its survival. So, when Verónica met a little over ten years ago, at the Ascension Fair in Oviedo, the last potter in Faro who, although already retired, was still making some pieces, and he told her that maybe he would call her if he needed a hand to increase production, she said yes when José Manuel Vega ‘Selito’ went to pick her up in Cangas del Narcea. “The two potters knew each other, there was a very good relationship, Selito knew my grandfather,” Verónica remembers.
So, almost two years ago, in October 2022, the last potter from Llamas del Mouro went to work in Faro to “learn shapes and glazes, because the ceramics were very different,” she explains. Thus, the Selito workshop in Faro began to produce as it had not done for many years, thanks to the involvement of Verónica, who did not neglect the canguese ceramics that saw its birth, which is why she combined the two tasks.
In Faro, there are two types of ceramics, dark brown and glazed. The first, sometimes black in colour, is obtained by mixing at high temperature three clays, very rich in siliceous and ferruginous materials that, in many cases, are extracted from the same area. The second, glazed ceramic, is glazed in white with decorations in green, yellow, brown and blue. For their part, the decorative motifs of the Faro pieces are geometric and naturalistic, plant and animal, highlighting among the latter the “paxara”, half fish, half bird.
At the end of July last year, a gas explosion from a ceramic kiln destroyed part of “Selito’s” house and with it, the workshop where he and Verónica had been working since October 2022. Fortunately, only material damage was reported, no personnel, but the Faro potters were left without their workplace.
At that time, Fina, a neighbor from Faro, offered “Selito” and Verónica a space on her farm so that they could set up a new workshop and continue working. He refused the “temporary” change of location and Verónica accepted, creating this workshop alone where the ceramic production continued.
Association of Friends of Faro Pottery
Hand in hand with the Faro Neighborhood Association, and motivated by the concern of its members about the possible disappearance of the trade and with it of the production of ceramics, after the retirement of “Selito” for health reasons, the association was born in 2012. Association of Friends of the Faro Pottery, chaired by the potter himself, who, years later, would go to look for Verónica in her hometown. Eva Sánchez, secretary of the association and one of its promoters as a representative of the neighborhood, tells it.
The day we met Verónica at the workshop, the one she set up in the space that her neighbor Fina so kindly gave up after the explosion, to make this report, we were greeted by a different person from the one we had met in the photos, without her characteristic smile and her friendly and close gesture. She was accompanied by her husband Jesús, Eva, Rafael and Sharon, all members of the Association of Friends of Pottery.
The same association that ‘Selito’ had chaired (even honorarily) and that a few hours before had resigned, in front of the media, to announce the creation of a new group, the ‘Xunta pola defense of traditional pottery of Faro’, claiming the “traditional way” of making the pieces and minimizing the contact maintained for years with Verónica. This led to a split within the Association, which went from 23 to 12 members, according to its secretary, Eva Sánchez.
From the Association of Friends of Faro, they witness “stunned and hurt” the statements of their former partner. “He was very good, but by no means the best,” he says about his former teammate Rafael Fueyo. They recognize that relations within the entity began to “deteriorate” when in 2018 they commissioned one of its members, Toño Huerta, to create a catalog of Faro ceramic pieces, whose texts “were identical,” they say, to those of another publication signed by Esperanza Ibáñez de Aldecoa, recipient of the first “Barbón” for her documentary “The Processes of Mud.”
Since the catalogue was financed by public subsidies, the Association decided to ignore this publication and thus transferred it to its author and the entity that had financed it. “We are not accusing him of anything, we are simply reporting this situation,” the Association states. The result is that Toño Huerta, a member of the new organization, ended up leaving the Association “overnight.”
‘Parees Fest’ and Faro ceramics
The “Parees Fest” is a contextual muralism festival born in Oviedo in 2017, by the artistic creators Edu Crespo and Laura Lara. 2024 is the seventh edition of this cultural, social and artistic event, which offers citizens a new look at Oviedo through large walls and party walls.
In the first edition, seventeen murals were made in different neighborhoods of the municipality of Oviedo, since the actions are not only carried out in the city, they have also been carried out in other areas around the Asturian capital, although not of this year, such as Olloniego, Trubia or Tudela Veguín.
The leitmotif of the competition is the link between artistic creations and the territory. Thus, in previous editions of the “Parees Fest”, the murals were dedicated to mining, the Trubia weapons factory or traditional Asturian sports, in addition to other themes, always linked to the Asturian territory, obtained through citizen participation processes.
In this seventh edition, three murals have been painted and, in this case, all located in the same neighborhood, Villafría-Otero and dedicated to Asturian culture. Thus, three muralists, María Peña (Mapecoo), Slim Safont and Marat Morik, now make their creations based on the Madonna, the apple and the ceramics of Faro.
Russian artist Marat Morik creates his mural based on the expertise of Faro, who “was very involved in the process,” as Edu Crespo explains, and stands out for his mastery of graffiti, as well as a contemporary aesthetic that combines realism, cubism and expressionism.
And for the director of the competition, it is essential that the distribution of the themes on which the murals are based is based on a joint process between the festival and the artists, so that they are also part of the selection.
The idea is to choose large spaces where there will be no construction and with the greatest possible visibility to make these creations an integrated stage in the circuit of visits to Oviedo.
Archaeological excavations at Casa Tudela
Since last April, archaeologist Alfonso Fanjul has been chairing the Association of Friends of Faro Pottery. He was in charge of leading last year’s excavations at Casa Tudela, a catalogued archaeological site in Faro, where more than 800 pieces dating back to the 18th century were extracted, according to Rafael Fueyo.
Pots, plates, bowls and even toys made in Faro three centuries ago, in which, and thanks to the traces of the potters, it has been possible to know the existence of a child population dedicated to pottery in this city of Oviedo. Along with her, women also worked in the potteries, they were in charge of decorating the pieces, although it was always the men who were the protagonists of this ancient craft.
Just like its ceramics, the Faro Association is eagerly awaiting the construction of the future Pottery Centre, which the Oviedo City Council is about to launch a call for tenders for, according to what it announces. This is an essential step to guarantee the continuity of this traditional craft. As its members assure, “Verónica now has the responsibility of moving forward with the pottery of Asturias on her back”.
The idea is that this new center will have a workshop with stable production and a store for sale. An exhibition room for antique pieces, a research center to learn more about its history and a school-workshop are the spaces with which it is planned to complete the center.
A little closer in time is the appointment with the ‘Barbón de Faro’ award, an award that the association has been giving for ten years, at the end of September, to people and entities that have distinguished themselves for their work in the dissemination and preservation of pottery. This year, the association’s board of directors, meeting last May, decided to give the award to the media.
