The Museum. The museum of the Trementinaires, located in Tuixén, comprises of the Route of the offices of yesterday, and has been promoted by the Local Consell of the Alt Urgell. One is open to the public from the month of December of 1998. The visit to this museum will allow us to know who were "trementinaires", that grass and remedies commercialized and as they organized his routes, always on foot, from Tuixén to level earth the interior and the coast of Catalonia.
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If you want to see the greatest image above clicad. (Drawing of Oriol Garcia i Quera).
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The "Trementinaires". The office of "trementinaire" is necessary to locate it in the moment in which the demographic pressure of half-full of the century XIX, that caused the seasonal exodus of many men and women of these valleys towards richer zones. It was in this frame of social dismemberment that many women of the valley of Tuixén dedicated themselves to extract of that rough earth and little thanked for an average one to survive the transformations of a Catalonia by which, walking and loaded of grass and oils, they were curing all evils.
The knowledge of the plants, their medicinal virtues and the processes of processing of ancestral remedies, acquired by oral transmission, were, among others, the factors that motivated to them to exert this, at that time, new office.
Its name must to the trementina, the remedy that more popularity gave them.
This office absorbed to most of the feminine population of the valley for more than one hundred years. The last trip made the Sofía d'Ossera, in 1982.
They twice marched one or to the year and could get to be outside from only days to the four months. Most of "trementinaires" they always followed the same route, since most from the houses to where the fixed clients went was year after year. |
They were not used to entering the great cities, nor frequented the markets to sell its remedies, since they used one more a personal and direct relation with people.
The trementina. The original process of the processing of the trementina part of the extraction of the resin of the red pine. This, once purified, was ready to be used. Its aspect when she was cold was been accustomed to, crystalline and grayish.
The processing that is known, but, of "trementinaires" is the one of a trementina reelaborada from the bought raw materials in "droguerías" -Greek- and pegamiento in the pharmacies -the trementina essence-.
Each "trementinaire" made this way its own trementina, and they were possible to be found of different textures and colors.
The use but frequents that it occurred to the trementina era in patch form on the affected zone. These patches of trementina very were used against the pain, the blows and the twists. It was good also for the bites of spider or snake, for the ulcers and great infections.
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