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Roger Mahan He was thirty years old when he first set foot in Spain in the late 1970s. He was traveling with his friend Jim, a New Zealander, on what he calls the “Trail of Failures”. With 30 dollars in their pockets, they settled in Madrid, where they would teach at a well-known English academy, and on their first day in the city they considered themselves an important task: Rugby ground.
Language barriers led them by mistake to the Vicente Calderon, where they spent little of what they had to watch the first soccer match, but on the second try they fine-tuned their strategy by asking for directions with a soccer ball. Rugby. They arrive at University City’s Central Field, introduce themselves as New Zealanders, and soon find themselves facing a coach whose only words are: “Training, Tuesday”.
A man of few words Linen square, eventually a legend of Spanish rugby, who by then had been in the capital for two decades from Boston Valley in Navarra. His sister Joan Remember General Lino liked rugby “because apart from being healthy, it’s a classic sport and not as polluted as others”. and Mahan, in conversation GeneralAnd says: “When we came to Madrid, he was all over the architecture club. God. He still is.”
The friendship between Mahan and Plaza that day was one of Plaza’s lesser-known accomplishments and the seed of a minor urban legend. Boston Accordingly, the origin of Kiwi crops in the valley is in Rugby. A player, international umpire, coach, manager and national rugby manager over the years, Plaza organized rallies in Legaros to teach locals how to improve for New Zealand players. And they were a player from a gap, a concentration New Zealand He opined that the land of Bastan is suitable for kiwi cultivation.
Over three decades, it has 133 hectares of estates in Navarra and the Basque Country. Kiwi That, According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, produces 1,078 tonnes of fruit per year. Figures far from Galicia, a leading community with more than half of the total hectares dedicated to this crop with a production of almost 18,000 tonnes.
Some of Mahan’s friends mention him in reports, sitting on a terrace in the Madrid neighborhood of Samard. General, as “the man who brought the first kiwi to Spain”. But he makes it clear: “Maybe at first Carlos del RioAcross the Tui River was a plantation on the border with Portugal. There one day in 1969, del Río told his wife he was going to test “a hairy fruit like a potato,” and thanks to the investment of Pescanova’s founder, José Fernández López, 100 specimens were planted in the town of Gondomar, Pontevedra.
At that time, kiwis were exported to Germany for 100 pesetas per piece, which unleashed a gold rush by the Galician del Rio and Fernández company, the only way to obtain seeds or plants at the time. In 1981, a student named Vincent Villar It was planted in France to obtain a specimen. After some time he recalled his victory like this From journalist Carmen Perez-Long Country: “Coming from New Zealand, it seemed a bit twisted and complicated; but there were gardens in France. I found a nursery, I returned home, brought two trailers with 7,000 plants in the winter, and sold 5,000 of them. I opened the Kiwi market to all men”. A year later, in 1982, Carrefour began selling kiwifruit at prices ranging from 99 to 125 pesetas per piece. The company Villar founded, Kiwi Atlantico, is today the largest marketer of kiwi in Spain.
Kiwi reached hypermarkets hosted by Spain Football World Cup. Mahan was hired as manager of his country’s football team and received a request from the team to select a plant in the World Cup garden in front of the Bernabeu to represent New Zealand. Plaza responded to the request by choosing linen from New Zealand or Farmio, and instead of placing a plaque commemorating the country’s officials or ambassador on duty, he had the descriptive “linen.” “He’s 100% Basque,” Mahan says of him, “and he has no time to lose.”
During that time, Mahan traded his rugby and training with Plaza for importing Australian prawns, New Zealand fish and, of course, kiwi. His goal was to become the local representative of wholesalers in his country, because Spain is one of the largest consumers of kiwifruit in Europe, 2.7 kilograms per person per year. “But when everything was almost closed, they took another one,” he explains.
It was then that his friend Lino suggested that he become a producer. Do it in Boston Valley. According to Mahan, the popular urban legend could be the rugby player himself, but the credit goes to Plaza Bastandra, who saw the opportunity before him. “Mine is revenge against wholesalers,” he laughs.
The New Zealander had doubts about the Atlantic microclimate, which is often evoked in the literature, in which, in addition to kiwi, palm trees and other elements are commonly found in the tropics today. “It seemed to me that it was too close to the Pyrenees and too cold,” he recalls. They were encouraged to start in 1982, the year an extraordinary snowfall closed the first plantations, causing entrepreneurs to fear the worst. Instead, the plants survived, resulting in the sweetest kiwis Mahan had ever tasted. “When I said it in New Zealand they didn’t believe it.”
He also joined the adventure as a partner Miguel Mintagea“You’re living on a mountain of money and you don’t realize it,” recalled rugby players gathered at Legaros and technicians invited by Mahan from New Zealand to Bustan.
However, fitting into the valley is not entirely easy. Mintegia remembers the discussions at the bar because the fruit was not typical for the region and was more successful with suggestions about creating gardens and marketing across the Cantabrian coast rather than hyperlocal production. “Could have done more,” he says.
Today Kiwi Baztan’s pioneer testimony is carried by Maite Urroz, Lander Sagaseta and Joseba Zarratea through the organic production company. Gibby. Uros explains that in Navarra, unlike Galicia, plots are small and fragmented, and the larger ones are generally used for livestock. It is an area where labor is scarce due to the abundance of opportunities in industries such as Arcelor or the hospitality sector. “There’s a lot of attachment to the land, and it seems like giving them away to dedicate it to something else,” he explains over the phone. “But it might as well be tradition in forty years of history.”
The new tradition would have begun, in Mahan’s words, with a trip to honor failures. A passes through It paid off because of the unlikely friendship between Navarres and the New Zealanders formed in rugby, then subtly raised by Mahan into the urban legend it is today. A curious hyperlocal footnote in the history of a fruit that, like everything else in agriculture -and by extension life-, is associated with immigrants and travelers; Entrepreneurs and adventurers; Also, some other fights.
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