In the Jaws of Cerberus

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BBC Radio 4 - In the Jaws of Cerberus

Personal accounts of the Southern European heatwave heatwave from Spain, Italy and Greece.

Three people who farm land in Spain, Italy and Greece, describe the challenge of this summer's Cerberus heatwave and how it has affected their relationship with the land they work.

This summer’s heatwave in Southern Europe was viewed from a distance in Britain with sympathy and occasional shock when wild fires
ripped through familiar holiday destinations.  However, for people working on the land in Spain, Italy and Greece, the three heads of the Cerberus 
heatwave, it’s been a brutal slog. Chris Stewart has been keeping sheep on his smallholding in Southern Spain for thirty years, knowing, but never quite believing that things were going to get increasingly hard according to the forecasters. After this year’s summer with the spring that supplies his home from aquifers deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains running dangerously low, the dire warnings seem very present.  
Annalisa Piras is a writer, journalist and also smallholder who farms Lavender.  There was a very real danger, as the heatwave took hold, that her entire crop
would either wither in the heat, or be consumed by fire. The only solution was to bring it in a month early, with all the losses and risks to quality that entailed.
And there’s a similar story for the Vineyard owner Edward Maitland-Makgill-Crighton and his wife Eileen Botsford Velissaropoulos.  Eileen is a native of the Island of Syros where she met Edward whose family have had a holiday home there for forty years. They launched Ousyra wines five years ago and while their concentration on indigenous grape varieties has been a success, this year's heat forced grape harvesting forward by a month. 
In this programme we hear about their summer, how it has affected the way they think about the land, their land, and what the future might hold.  None of them
want to appear as pleaders for special treatment or deserving of undue sympathy. They simply want to explain what it has been like to work through a heatwave that shows every sign of becoming a regular occurrence.”

Producer Tom Alban

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