The good cop who saved the three-millennial chickens of Cádiz

Chema Rodríguez

Updated Thursday, March 28, 2024-16:11

The

oldest

living trace

of the Phoenician civilization in the West is not in any archaeological museum. Nor in any of the sites where remains of this pre-Roman culture have been found. The oldest living trace left by the Phoenicians in these lands is in El Chozo, the farm where Mariano Sánchez lives on the outskirts of Medina Sidonia (Cádiz). And this retired local police officer is his savior and his custodian.

In the 10,000 hectares of the domain of the former chief of the Local Police of Medina Sidonia, DNA more than 3,000 years old

, that of the chickens and roosters that landed with the Phoenicians,

is preserved, and not in a test tube but in freedom.

when, coming from the ports of the Middle East, they settled on the Iberian Peninsula.

In El Chozo Mariano there have been

up to 300 specimens

, alive and well, of roosters and hens directly related to those that arrived in the 12th century BC on Phoenician ships, according to the chronicles of the Roman historian Veleyus Paterculus. A legacy that ran the risk of disappearing at the end of the 20th century and that was saved and survives today thanks to this good cop and a handful of stubborn people who, like him, refused to let a part of the Andalusian and Spanish heritage disappear.

The great-great-great-granddaughters of the Phoenician chickens, and the roosters, are now called southern hens, and roosters, which have little to do with the chickens and roosters that were introduced later to industrialize breeding and egg-laying. In appearance and behavior, the southern chicken, which in the 16th century was known as

gallipavo

, is unique and, for this reason, Mariano and the rest of the rescuers grouped in the Andalusian Federation of Southern Chicken Breeders are determined to have it recognized as a breed. Spanish native.

Just over half an hour by car from El Chozo, in Puerto Real, there are documented

remains of chickens that are more than 2,700 years

old. They were found at the Castillo de Doña Blanca site and are, along with those also found in Tsocanos (Málaga), the oldest in the West, in addition to irrefutable scientific proof that the Phoenician chicken roamed and laid eggs in the same areas. lands where their descendants do so today.

But how does a local police officer end up rescuing a three-millennial chicken?

Mariano, while finishing picking up at the municipal booth where the eighth Medina Sidonia Poultry Exhibition was held (from the 15th to the 17th), tells

Crónica

that it was more

a product of chance

than anything else. He had studied Teaching, although he ended up as a local police officer in this Cadiz municipality of ancient ancestry, where he became head of the municipal body.

He says that he was on duty, in a fire in a local area, when a firefighter from neighboring Alcalá de los Gazules told him, for the first time, about the southern chicken. He was so intrigued (by curiosity, not by the chicken) that he went to visit his corral and the firefighter gave him the

first batch

of specimens, three chickens and a rooster. "I started browsing, contacting other breeders, I joined associations and attended exhibitions, it was my hobby," he says.

That was approximately twenty years ago and since four years ago, when he retired and hung up his uniform, the battle for the recognition of the southern race as an

indigenous breed

has become for him a kind of vital mission. He wants it to be his legacy and he dedicates a good part of his time to it, along with the members of his local association and those of the Andalusian federation. With the help and complicity, he stands out, of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Córdoba, of his research group in animal genetic resources, as well as of the technicians of the Agricultural Center of the Provincial Council of Córdoba.

The most ambitious scientific study

ever done on the southern chicken

is being carried out in the university laboratories of Córdoba .

Blood samples and morphometric data are being collected from 324 specimens throughout the Andalusian territory in order to obtain the genetic profile of the southern chicken, definitive proof that it is a unique breed that is a direct heir to the Phoenician.

Specimens of southern chickens, on the El Chozo farm.

With the same objective, a census of breeders

and an x-ray of the situation of the breed

are being prepared .

The last time something similar was done, Mariano points out, in 2019, there were more than a thousand breeders and about 30,000 specimens. Nothing to do with the panorama at the end of the last century, when this Phoenician legacy was on the verge of being reduced to an archaeological vestige.

A couple of roosters and six or seven chickens live in El Chozo - Mariano has to share his time with a young grandson and his children who live abroad - enough to prove that the southerner is not just any chicken.

"It is very rustic and adapts very well to the environment, it lives

wild

, they need space," details the retired local police officer with legitimate pride. Although there is more. The southern woman does not need, nor does she want, to eat grain, "she seeks life" and feeds on worms, worms or grass and does not sleep indoors, that's it. It grows on olive, pomegranate or moral trees "whether it's cold, hot or windy" and its resistance to diseases is much superior. A super breed.

From the outside, what you see is also different. Above all because of the colorful plumage that has allowed the identification of up to

fourteen varieties

of which six are already established, adds Mariano, capable of talking about the southern variety as much as his interlocutor allows.

There is the white southern one, snowy even in its legs; the black, like coal; the dirty white, which is not dirty but has its white plumage dotted with browns and blacks; the partridge, with a black breast, a golden neck and red wings bordering on burgundy; the ash, with a light gray body but a black neck; and, finally, the Franciscan, with its black and white feathers.

So unique is the southern hen that even

Miguel de Cervantes

immortalized it in

Don Quixote

, known at that time as gallipavo: "And even if you're going to tell the truth, what I eat in my corner without fuss or respect, even if it's bread and bread, tastes much better." onions, than the gallipavos on other tables where I am forced to chew slowly.

All that remains is for it to be immortalized in another book, five centuries later, the catalog of native Spanish breeds.