El Prat

In view of the mega debacle at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 last week, and the chaos last summer at Barcelona’s Aeroport del Prat, we can only wait in trepidation to see what happens when the new Terminal Sur opens in 2009. It’s already behind schedule. According to Aena, the Spanish airport authority, (I translate) “The new terminal building is of a tremendous logistical and technical complexity. It will handle over 100,000 passengers a day and employ over 15,000 people.”

Keep your fingers crossed.

El Prat, by the way, is nothing to do with the British word for a stupid person, but is Catalan for a field or meadow, hinting at the area’s agricultural past. (For all you info junkies/pub quiz writers out there, the town of El Prat del Llobregat has over 60,000 inhabitants and is twinned, endearingly, with Fingal, Ireland, home to Dublin International Airport.) El Prat’s real claim to fame, however, is the El Prat chicken, an autochthonous breed and the only one in Spain to be awarded the European Union’s Indicación Geográfica Protegida. For me the name pollastre del Prat always evokes an image of chickens (possibly headless) flapping and clucking along the main runway. There’s a pile of very very detailed specifications about the colour and texture of feathers, feet, eyes and beak, but all you really need to know is that El Prat chickens and capons are fed a diet of 80% grains and are allowed to live for a minimum of 90 days. Each one (when dead, that is) has a numbered label with the blue and yellow European IGP seal.

Here are live El Prat chickens pecking around (not on the runway though).

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