“I’ve heard about it at the fishmongers, at the health centre, everywhere!… There’s no one who doesn’t talk about your ice cream shop,” a neighbour from San Lorenzo de El Escorial can be heard saying as soon as she enters the cosy new premises of Campo A Través – Microheladería Trashumante (calle San Agustín, 2. San Lorenzo de El Escorial). This project, promoted by Paula López Montero (Madrid, 30 years old) and María Luz Villegas (Granada, 29 years old) began two years ago, but a couple of months ago it materialised into a simple shop with a workshop where they make and serve their delicious artisan creations. Behind it, there is a story of real estate speculation, love and the search for a flock of goats. Life itself.Paula López Montero making ice cream in her workshop. INMA FLORES Villegas tells the same thing to each of the people who come to her ice cream shop. With the intact enthusiasm of someone who speaks to the first customer of her business, she explains: “All the ice creams are made with goat's milk from grazing Guadarrama, with a flock that is in Navas del Marqués (Ávila). Every day we have a different flavour and today's is goat's yoghurt with raspberries from a farmer from Peguerinos (Ávila). But we also have half-litre jars with seasonal flavours to take home”. More information The first thing that draws attention is the use of goat's milk, something unusual in ice cream shops. “Some restaurants do make it for their desserts and in the Canary Islands there is a cheese factory that also makes ice cream in summer with its milk. But we don't know of an ice cream shop that is 100% goat's milk”, says López Montero. These entrepreneurs lived until recently in Madrid. “At first we were in the centre, then we had to move to a more distant neighbourhood and, in the end, the city ended up expelling us because of the prices.” One of them worked as a physiotherapist and the other, after studying Audiovisual Communication and Philosophy, had a scholarship at the National Library. There, reading the newspapers one morning, she found the news about the existence of a school for shepherds in the Sierra de Guadarrama. She wrote and they both signed up. “I realised that I didn’t want to be in front of a computer and that I needed to recover the link of my childhood with nature, since I spent part of it in Monte Peguerinos,” says López Montero. The landscapes of childhood accompany us throughout our lives. Sometimes they look for each other without knowing it, although in her case it was premeditated and they ended up living together in San Lorenzo de El Escorial. “The practices at the school for shepherds lasted 15 days and it changed our lives,” she remembers.
From the flock to the ice cream
“The idea was to have a herd of goats of our own,” Villegas says. And, to learn the wisdom of the trade, they went to visit goatherds from Cadiz to Mallorca. “At the shepherds’ school they insisted that we had to take a look at the countryside, because the only use of the livestock is with meat, cheese making and, if we were lucky, yogurt.” López Montero had worked in an ice cream parlour and it occurred to him to experiment at home with goat milk. “With the school we visited the shepherdess Elsa Fernández, in Fresnedillas de La Oliva (Madrid). And I helped her to herd from time to time, I milked and she brought me the milk to test in my kitchen,” he recalls.
The process was 100% homemade, like someone who starts making bread for the first time. “We didn’t have an ice cream maker, we churned the dough by hand for half an hour. It’s very laborious, but as soon as the first ice cream came out we looked at each other thinking: This is good! And we started to fantasize about having an ice cream shop and our own herd of goats,” López Montero recalls. “The idea was to have a herd of goats to have our own milk. But access to land was complicated and setting up a livestock farm was complicated, and even more so being two girls with no tradition or ties to livestock,” Villegas explains before listing the bureaucracy they have had to endure and the impossibility of accessing public and private pasture in the area. “There is no public pasture and private pasture is inaccessible to us because of the price,” she summarises. So they decided to put the cart before the horse: start producing ice cream with milk from nearby herds. “We want to grow backwards and end up having our own livestock farm,” says Villegas.
The milk they currently work with comes from the Guadarrama breed of goats, owned by the shepherd Mario Esteban Correal, in Navas del Marqués. “Mario is the president of the Association of Goat Breeders of the Guadarrama breed, as well as being one of the last to have this breed in danger of extinction. In 2016 there were just under eight thousand heads of cattle and, today, there are only about four thousand. There is no generational change and the problem with the countryside is romanticising it. It is all very well to talk about environmentalism from offices and offices, but you have to go out there, understand it, give them tools and encourage young people to return to the countryside,” says López Montero. They go up three days a week to get milk with jugs they bought on the internet and bring back fifty litres each time. They use them to prepare ferments and ice cream. “We make them daily, although they have to mature for 24 hours before being sold.”
Ice cream of the day, 10 different flavors and a homemade yogurt
At first they sold only to consumer groups from the mountains and friends. “They knew our history and our way of working from home. Without them we couldn’t have started.” Now they have a loyal clientele who come to their shop for their artisan creations. Every day they offer a new ice cream to eat in a tub (3.50 euros) and they haven’t repeated a flavour since they opened. “People love that there is only one because it allows them to try new things.” Since they opened, they have paraded ice creams such as cottage cheese with figs and honey, fermented lemon with thyme flowers or brioche from Obrador Abantos, a wonderful bakery in the same town, with fermented cherries. And all the fruit they use is organic and they buy it directly from the producers, without intermediaries.
The yoghurt board for the day of Cross Country changes every 24 hours. INMA FLORES They also offer half-litre tubs (between 10 and 12 euros) of 10 stable flavours for each season. “Now in summer we like to play with the freshness of ferments and fruits,” they explain. That is why, in their offer to take home, you can find the lemon with mint (10 euros), the kefir with vanilla and roasted peach (12 euros), the yoghurt with saffron and apricots (12 euros), the milk meringue (10 euros) or the raspberry, oat and cocoa nib (12 euros). “We have had to make our own recipe book by researching with fermentation books and biology manuals, because almost all the recipes are designed to be made with cow's milk. With the ice cream, we play with the percentage of fat, sugar and fruit. We work without additives: no preservatives, no emulsifiers, no colorants.” They have also created a native yogurt from Guadarrama. “Before, in Spain, each region had its own ferments or bacteria cultures that made the yogurt you drank in Asturias have nothing to do with the one from Granada, but it has become homogenized with the industry and much of that culture has been lost. We have developed a yogurt from scratch here.”
On the shelves of Campo a través you can find books on fermentation, natural wines and other artisan products that share their philosophy. INMA FLORES And to complete the offer, on the shelf of the premises presided over by the phrase No hay cabra sin pueblo ni pueblo sin cabras, there is not only a glass tank of water for customers to pour as they please, there are also good bottles of natural wines for sale. “We select them according to the ingredients of the ice creams of the season. Now they are lighter wines, with less alcohol. We like to pair ice cream and wine because normally people cut the wine with dessert. Our idea is that you open a bottle for dessert,” Villegas explains.
An association in defense of artisanal ice cream
Faithful to the defence of the value of craftsmanship, their plans include setting up an association to protect it. “All ice creams, from the most industrial to the least, always have the word artisan, and it has nothing to do with what we do.” They claim that, just as has happened in the world of bread, with sourdough, and in the world of coffee, with the speciality ones, the world of ice cream should be the next. “We want to value the dairy part and encourage other small new projects that emerge, to look around them to see what milk they can get nearby and not go to the supermarket. Our project can be replicated: people ask us if we would do it in Madrid. And hopefully, and doing it this way. That would mean that the shepherds would have more work.” And all without losing sight of the fact that what they want is to build a neighbourhood project. “San Lorenzo is a large and touristy town, and we wanted the people here to feel proud that this exists and make it their own.” Something that, in a very short time, they have already achieved thanks to their ice creams.
Paula López Montero in the neighboring Obrador Abantos, which supplies them with some products for their ice creams, such as cookies and buns.INMA FLORESYou can follow EL PAÍS Gastro on Instagram and X.
