can Pau Foguera

Josep Travesa, Pepitu, was born in 1930 in Can Pau Foguera, one of the smallest farmhouses in the old municipality of Olzinelles where his ancestors lived for generations. The sea breezes from the Mediterranean blew smoothly in the facade of his house, built on the sunny slope of one of the low hills of the Catalan coastal range of Montnegre. Next to his house, Pepitu took care of a subsistence agroforestry system carefully adapted to the regime of a temporal stream: cereals, vines, olive trees, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, holm oaks… His family’s livelihood combined extensive dry land farming, livestock raising, and paid work as tree feller and cork peeler for the production of charcoal, firewood, timber and cork in the large forest estates. During his life he witnessed how most of the farmhouses of Olzinelles were abandoned and their tenants migrated to nearby towns and cities searching for better life conditions. His only daughter Aurora also decided to leave Can Pau Foguera as she got married. His wife Assumpció plunged into a severe senile dementia that progressively erased her memory. Pepitu remained the last peasant of Olzinelles to live in a 'traditional' way until he died in February 2006. And he did so with an extraordinary fullness and happiness that contrasted with the decadence of the whole universe that was going to disappear with his death.
   
Can Pau Foguera according to illustrator Carme Lorente (included in the book 'La vall d'Olzinelles. Els dominis de l'alzinar i la sureda' by Otero et al., 2007).

According to the well-known artist and neighbor of Pepitu Perejaume, 'the morning when we put his body in the cemetery of Olzinelles, all those landscapes became smaller; lost size, contrast and depth'. But when he was alive and 'you were in Can Pau Foguera, that reality was not at all nostalgic, it was rather the other way around; there was the possibility of perceiving that another concept of reality was possible. It was more like a revolutionary vision, as far as you could realize that there was another possibility in the world: a parallel world'. 

Pepitu's twilight, a myriad of worlds to emerge (summer 2005). 

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