Old and advisable custom

The congregation of stands, more well-known like free fair, seems to sing with the shouts of the tens of salesmen who settle in the middle of the street with their fresh merchandise and to low cost. These places of commerce date in the country from the XVlll century. 

SANTIAGO. Aroma to fruits and vegetables fresh, which they are conjugated with shouts that promote the merchandise, arise when approaching one of the 800 free fairs that there are in the Metropolitan Region, where is Santiago, the capital of Chile. 

This type of commerce dates somewhere in the country from century XVIII, when the producers sold their merchandise directly, settling concurred of the city. From 1953, each Chilean municipality adjudged the total regulation of this popular source of work that operated in the place. 

Hugo Farías (58 years), has a position or stand in a free fair regulated by the Municipality of the commune of Independence, located to the north of Santiago. Routine of this man initiates each week to four of dawn, between Tuesday and Sunday, days in which it leaves to provide itself merchandise in the Fertile valley (a great market of fruits and vegetables of the capital, that sells products to wholesalers to smaller cost), soon to go to its site of work. One settles in the fair that extends approximately throughout five blocks in the space that corresponds to him, of three meters in length. 

"I have been for thirty years here. It is a business that I inherited it of my older brother, than retired due to its outpost age. Altogether the fair has more than fifty years of existence ", commented. 

Commerce ' verdé 

According to the president of the Association of Unions of Feriantes of Chile (Asof), Tiled Héctor explained to this weekly magazine, more than 40 thousand people dedicate itself to this work, in addition to 150 thousands ' coleros' or who settle at the end of the fair, and that they do not count on the corresponding municipal permission to be located in these places. 

A study of the National Camera of Commerce revealed that 77 million people circulate annually in regular form around the concurred fairs more of Santiago. The investigation also asserted that during the ends week each selling desire to the day around 60 dollars, whereas the illegal commerce invoice by person 24 dollars daily, in equal period. 

For Gabriel Salazar, historian and author of the book free Fairs: residual space of the citizen sovereignty, which attracts people to visit this class of businesses is "the communitarian identity, the convival culture and the amiability of those who take care of them".
The free fairs are something very typical and popular in Chile, and that far from dying by the influence of the great supermarkets and commercial centers, have known to adapt, offering cheaper prices and good quality to its clients, thus to dominate to a 12 percent of the commerce of fruits and vegetables of the country. 

Ana Luisa Ramirez 

источник публикации
Times of the World