El Tablero is alive with the smell and taste of tomatoes during its 27th Zafra Fair

 

The Plaza de la Iglesia in El Tablero hosted the 27th Feria de La Zafra this Saturday, enveloped in a festive atmosphere. Organized by the Department of Culture of the San Bartolomé de Tirajana City Council, the event featured a program of activities designed to refresh the village's agricultural and sharecropping origins with a community and family focus.

 

 

Inaugurated by Mayor Marco Aurelio Pérez Sánchez, the Fair this year boasted 26 tents dedicated to handicrafts, sales of locally sourced products, a storytelling and reading corner with specific bibliography about the harvest and the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, a workshop on traditional games and children's crafts, and, among other things, show cooking demonstrations by the famous chef from El Tablero, Aridani Alonso Rodríguez, an expert in the different uses of the tomato as the star product of his culinary art.

 

The exhibition and sale of handicrafts, organized in collaboration with Fedac, highlighted the offerings of ceramics, leather goods, candlemaking, weaving, glassmaking, toys, openwork, felt and doll making, jewelry and accessories, macrame, stonework, soaps, wood, bags and recycling, crochet, cane, Canarian openwork, and also the striking and colorful artistic creations made with the patchwork technique by the seamstress from El Tablero, Pili Rufo.

 

Other tents were dedicated to food and the sale of local products, including artisanal pastries, natural juices, honeys, jams, artisanal ice creams, and, among others, the 'Tiempo del Sur' wines, made with minimal intervention in the winery by the brothers Adal and Acoidal Álvarez Vega from El Tablero. Among these stands, the one run by Pino Pérez, Brígida Vega, Carmen Segura, Estebana Peña, Pino Sarmiento, and Ino Navarro, aged between 73 and 92, stood out once again for its aromas and flavors. These members of La Cuadrilla are a fixture at every edition of the Zafra Fair, thanks to their firsthand accounts as former sharecroppers and expert cooks, preparing the home-cooked meals that were traditionally made in the houses or huts on the farmlands during the difficult times when there were no set hours dedicated to planting and/or harvesting tomatoes.

 

The festive harvest day, where I also highlight the participation of Santiago Álvarez with his fully restored old tomato truck, was enlivened during the afternoon with the folkloric performance of the Parranda Asentaos y Tumbaos, until the taifa dance arrived which was enlivened until the early hours of the morning by the local parrandas Los Horcones and La Cucaña, and which was closed by the group El Último Trago with great enthusiasm from the attendees.