How many people know of the tradition in Urdiain, a village crouched in La Sakana, whereby four young villagers fill tankards with the first waters of the year that gush from the Cuatro Caños fountain in the village square as the church bells strike twelve, and then run like the devil’s chasing them to give this sacred water to local authority figures to drink? Little-known ethnographic treasures such as this and the beautiful songs that accompany them were recorded in Invierno (Winter), the final chapter dedicated by the Barojas to our Region and its landscape of rituals, season after season. The glacial parade in this case continues with the figures of the joaldunak and zanpantzar in Ituren and Zubieta, the olentzero of Lesaka and artisans who made cattle bells in Malerreka and clogs in Valcarlos. Undoubtedly a stellar season, the season of snow and carnival, to which they dedicated the longest chapter of their documentary, particularly to the carnival that takes place in Lantz, so beloved by Pío Caro Baroja, as he demonstrates cinematographically with playful subjective shots, adopting the gaze and the dance of the bandit Miel Otxin before he died, burning in his final pyre.
