- Akiloukap is a project developed by Yon Hourcat, from Lasa, with the collaboration of ETB. They started making t-shirts and txapels for themselves, imagining their hut, the mountains and the goats around them. But seeing that around them they liked clothes and started asking them, he thought about expanding the project. For a year now, Akiloukap has joined in another project: they have made artisanal soaps with the milk of the house goats.
“I had goats from before and I’ve always wanted to do something with them, so it occurred to me to start making soaps,” explains Hourcat. The young man from Lasa works with the old Pyrenean race that is being lost, and there are only about 4,000 heads in the entire French state. “This breed of goat doesn’t produce too much milk, but it has the right characteristics to make soaps: it’s a high-quality milk because it has a lot of water, and that’s very good to soothe leather diseases,” says the producer.
Hourcat has a team of 28 goats, free all year round in the mountain. “Pirenaica is a very rural breed that stays on the mountain year round and is very good at keeping our fields clean.” It was precisely this that was one of the main objectives of the young man in the implementation of the project: “The mountains are slowly emptying in the North, and that is noticeable, as the lands are volatilizing. Without the need for fire, our goats clean all these corners.” In order to enhance the breed, work is also under way to set up a group of cabreros together with others in the area. The idea is to make known the Pyrenean race and to change the prejudices that have been generated around it.
Hand soaps
When he launched the soaps project, Hourcat set up a space to make them in his house. “When kids are two months old, the goats are milking in the morning and in the afternoon I make the soaps,” he says. The whole process is done by hand, handcrafted and using totally natural elements. In addition to goat milk, soaps carry essential oils of different flavourings, olive oil and caustic soda. “We use biological components to carry them out. I don’t have the bio label at the moment, but the intention is to move on to it.” The young woman explained that these soaps have very good properties for the skin, especially for people with diseases.
He knows no one else who makes soaps with the milk of pyrenean goats in these places, the idea was taken over the internet by Hourcada of those who did the same with other races. Now, sell your products on the web akiloukap.fr and since February go to different fairs in Baja Navarra. Ahead of the summer, she hopes to be able to move to more places.