Bucaro

During the Spanish Golden Age, búcaros were ceramic containers, small vessels made of clayey earth, which were used to contain scented water, and which were eaten to maintain the paleness of the face, following the fashion of the time, and for other superstitious purposes such as regulating menstruation, as a contraceptive method and as a hallucinogen.

Etymology, origin and other uses

The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy notes the Mozarabic origin of the term búcaro, derived from the Latin pocŭlum 'cup', 'glass'. For his part, Covarrubias, in his Treasure of the Language, describes it: «type of glass from a certain red land that they bring from Portugal. "They say these muds are eaten by ladies to soften their color."

In some southern regions of Spain, búcaro is used as a synonym for botijo. In some areas of La Mancha, the container used in homes to place the manzanilla that was recently harvested in September and which perfumed the room was called búcaro.

In literature

Francisco López de Villalobos, famous court doctor of the XV century, cites the compilation several times in his work: «Summary of medicine in troubadour romance.

The literature of the Golden Age abounds in examples of the use of búcaros: "Girl of the broken color, either you have love or you eat mud," Góngora wrote in one of his lyrics. They are also cited by Lope de Vega, in La Dorotea, or by Francisco de Quevedo in the sonnet "To Amarili who had some pieces of búcaro in her mouth and was very close to eating them."

In later centuries, travelers through Spain such as Teófilo Gautier, Hipólito Taine and Victor Hugo, also mention the unusual use of the búcaro.

Hallucinogenic properties of red mud: bucarophagy

A unique habit of the Spanish Golden Age was, among the ladies of the nobility, eating clay, taking small bites of búcaros, the most appreciated being the Portuguese, especially those from Estremoz, and those brought from New Spain.

The historian Natacha Seseña cited as one of the possible origins of this habit the Muslim custom, already documented in Baghdad in the X century< /span>, of eating certain clays, a custom that could reach the Spanish court of the Austrias through the Moors.

This custom generated a disorder called opilation (a kind of chlorosis or anemia), which among its various effects opilated or covered certain ducts, serving to stop bleeding (especially heavy menstruation) or give an extreme paleness to the face (as reflection of the biliary crisis that it produced in the liver), at that time a sign of beauty. Contraceptive and hallucinogenic effects were also attributed to it. As an antidote, the doctors of the Spanish Court advised iron powder or going to drink ferruginous waters from the Fuente del Acero, then close to Manzanares, and to the that Lope de Vega dedicated his comedy El acero de Madrid.

• Ethnologist José Manuel Feito says that in Asturias "there was a habit of taking ashes dissolved in water to promote childbirth," a biblical relic of the "green waters" that Moses demanded of pregnant women suspected of adultery, a ritual of which Michel de Montaigne commented in his Tests: «I have seen them swallow sand and ash to acquire a pale color».

• Madame d'Aulnoy, on your trip to Spain at the end of the centuryXVII, he noted that “the Spanish nobles do not have anything that they like better than eating sugar”.

In the Spanish still life of the Golden Age

From the XVII century, bucaros appear in the baroque still lifes of Juan van der Hamen, Francisco Palacios, Juan by Espinosa, Antonio de Pereda, Francisco de Zurbarán or Giuseppe Recco, as well as in portraits of the Spanish Court such as those by Alonso Sánchez Coello and in Las meninas by Diego Velázquez. For its value as iconographic source has been especially useful for researchers of "bucarophagia" through the painting of the Spanish Golden Age, as shown in these details of paintings painted by Zurbarán and Espinosa (above), and by Van der Hamen and Pedro de Camprobín (see image).