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I find it a little hard to picture what the post-phylloxera Priorat must have been like, but seeing how the Priorat ended up from the 1980s onward, when demographic decline had reached its highest point, it is easy to assume that this agony was, like all agonies tend to be, long and slow.

Living among mountains is, from the outset, a great challenge for the spirit. It requires an added capacity to imagine what lies beyond the hills and knolls that surround the daily life of those who work the land in the Priorat, and of course anywhere mountainous. And all those who lived in the Priorat, enduring one of the worst vineyard crises known until then, needed a long time to realise that the Priorat was not the best place to make a living easily, whether as a farmer or otherwise. Back then there was no tourist planning, nor all the arrangements that exist today. The bridle paths were in full use by mules and walkers, and now, by contrast, they are being rescued from oblivion to be offered in tourist packages for hikers, riders and cyclists.

Over the years, the Priorat has opened up to the world thanks, among other things, to its wines; yet the region was never officially closed, even though there were villages that all but hung up the “closed” sign. And, alongside those villages, many of the crops also watched oblivion grow among their trees and plants.

But in the 1990s a revolution erupts in the economic and social fabric. The rebirth of winemaking in the Priorat took on a very different character from the one it had had until then. Those who worked that miraculous change used the best grapes of the Priorat, from the oldest vines, and the best and newest advertising and marketing techniques to place a few bottles of great, select wines at the very top of the shop window. The impact of that strategy was total, and the result is what we are living now: a host of wineries, small and not so small, began to establish themselves across the territory, along with several hundred hectares of newly planted vineyards. Small entrepreneurs and big speculators reached the international market together with their wines, and now the market stalls because of the great financial crisis of 2009. And so great doubts begin to arise about the economic viability of this whole grand tangle that has reconverted a Priorat which had fallen into disuse and was rescued from oblivion and misery not by altruists, but by opportunists who saw in it a rough diamond that had to be polished to renew its value.

That blaze, almost twenty years later, is going out on its own. As one might expect, it will not die out all at once; it will also be a slow agony like the post-phylloxera crisis. After the great explosion and the smoke that followed, when dust and oblivion have settled again into every corner of villages and fields, the strength of the mountain will still lie latent. Like a sleeping volcano waiting for another seismic movement to shake its structures, the Priorat will then awaken again. But first we shall have to wait and see how the suffocation gradually saps the strength of the flames until it leaves nothing but permanently glowing embers.

And now abandoned vines and crops are beginning to be seen again, lost and indistinguishable amid the dry vegetation that heralds the imminent arrival of the powerful Priorat summer. But meanwhile, grand buildings rise in the most unexpected places. Some already finished and seeking the expected economic return; others in the planning or advanced stages. Throughout the region, from north to south, there now stands the living testimony of a fantasy created around wine culture. A form of culture that has reached its greatest expression in the Priorat, with high-expression wineries and vineyards. Like haute couture in its day, which later gave way to other fashion trends: one more fashion that, like all of them, has had its moment of glory and which, once brought down to the level of the other cultures, becomes just one more fashion.

And yet the essence is unbeatable, like every Olympiad, since the latest celebration is always better than any of the previous ones. And the product the Priorat has sold until recently was truly the essence of a land and of vines punished by the harshness of a fairly extreme climate. Now the old vines are beginning to be a century old, and the new ones bear tasty, highly concentrated fruit, but they will never have the qualities of those post-phylloxera plantings carried out by those romantics of mountain farming who knew how to resist the temptation to abandon everything and fall into the easy life of factory work. On the contrary, those romantics turned their small plots of land, far from the urban din, into the spiritual refuge that also gave them a supplementary income, which over time dwindled in economic yield until it became the only bond of complicity with the memory of their ancestors, apart from the photographs hung along the hallways.

The history of the Priorat does not end here. There is still much more to see. The great capital buried in the Priorat in recent years in the form of colossal plantings and gigantic wineries has left the smallest growers open-mouthed, and also the biggest ones, who even now do not understand what kind of schemes these are. They know nothing of macroeconomics or marketing or anything other than working hard to earn their daily bread. They know what it truly costs to work the vines in the Priorat and the yield they give. And now they watch as a new cycle begins, with an ending presided over by a great question mark about the future of the grand works.

Until now, light aircraft and helicopters could be seen flying overhead, capturing with their gaze the charm hidden in the deep valleys or on the crags of contrasting red. Now, with the outbreak of this crisis that sweeps away so many hopes, the vultures too will return to their place. And it is only natural, for after a great rise there is always a fall, and many are tempted to throw themselves into it.

What the financial crisis will leave us that is good, above all, is having opened our eyes, closed by the initial dazzle. And it will put us back in our place. A place we really should never have left, and which only the oldest among us have known how to preserve.

And those foreclosed Americans, tempted by the aggressive mortgage sellers of a growing and ever more emergent United States, were able to give themselves the pleasure of drinking a few bottles of the finest wines in the world at the expense of the investing hopes of small savers.

Illusions, when all is said and done.

Dreams and mirages that for a moment, or for a few years, become reality, but that will finally turn once more into the embers of a great fire which, latent, will endure buried beneath the slate subsoil of the Priorat.