(A handbook for Travellers to Spain by Richard Ford – 1845)
R. vii. is a riding tour of bad roads and worse accommodations ; attend therefore, to our preliminary hints and get a Spanish passport from the Captain-General, or gefe politico, explain the scientific object of the excursion : letters of introduction to the superintendents of the mines are also useful. The distances must be taken approximatively ; they are mountain leagues, and very conventional. The botany in these dehesas y despoblados is highly interesting, and game abundant. An English double-barrel gun is useful in more respects than one. For some remarks on mines in Spain and the most useful books, see Cartagena.
Passing through Italica, the high road to Bajajoz is continued to the Venta de Pajanosa, 4 L., and then turns off to the l. over a waste of Xaras, cistus, and aromatic flowers given up to the bee and butterfly, to Algarrobo, a small hamlet. Hence 3 L. over a similar country to a mountain village, Castillo de las guardias, so called from its Moorish atalaya ; here sleep. 5 L., over a lonely dehesa, lead next day to Rio Tinto. The red naked sides of the copper mountain, La Cabeza Colorada, with clouds of smoke curling over dark pine woods, announce from afar these celebrated mines. The immediate approach to the hamlet is like that to a minor infernal region ; the road is made of burnt ashes and escoria, the walls are composed of lava-like dross, while haggard miners, with sallow faces and blackened dress, creep about, fit denizens of the place ; a small green coppery stream winds under the bank of firs, and is the tinged river, from whence the village takes its name. The stream flows out of the bowels of the mountain, and is supposed to be connected with some internal undiscovered ancient conduit ; it is from this that the purest copper is obtained ; iron bars are places in wooden troughs, which are immersed in the waters, when a cascara, or flake of metal, is deposited on it, which is knocked off ; the bar is then subjected to the same process until completely eaten away. The water is deadly poinsonous ; no animal or vegetable can live near it, an it stains and corrodes everything that it touches.
These mines were perfectly well known to the ancients, whose shafts and galleries are constantly being discovered. The Romans and Moors appear chiefly to have worked on the N. side of the hill ; the enormous accumulation of escoriales show to what an extent they carried on operations ; these old drosses are constantly used in the smelting, as from the imperfect methods of the ancients they are found to contain much unextracted copper.
The village is built about a mile from the mines, and was raised by one Liberto Wolters, a Swede, to whom Philip V. had granted a lease of the mines, which reverted to the crown in 1783. It is principally occupied by the miners ; there is, however, a decent posada ; the empleados and official people have a street to themselves. The view from above the church is striking ; the town lies below with its stream and orange groves ; to the l. rises the ragged copper hill, wrapt in sulphurous wreaths of smoke ; while to the r. the magnificent flat fir bank, which supplies fuel to the furnaces, la mesa de los pinos, is backed by a boundless extent of citus-clad hills, rising one over another.
A proper officer will conduct the traveller over the mines, and then follow the ore through every stage of the process, until it becomes pure copper ; visit therefore the Castillo de Solomon in the Cabesa Colorada. Entering the shaft you soon descend by a will, or pozo, down a ladder, to an under gallery ; the heat increases with the depth, as there is no ventilation ; at the bottom the thermometer stands at 80 Fahr., and the miners, who drive in, iron wedges into the rock previously to blasting, work almost naked, and what few clothes they have on are perfectly drenched with perspiration ; the scene is gloomy, the air close and poisonous, the twinkling flicker of the miners’ tapers blue and unearthly ; here and there figures, with lamps at their breasts, flit ab out like the tenants of the halls of Eblis, and disappear by ladders into the deeper depths. Melancholy is the sound of the pick of the solitary workman, who alone in his stone niche is hammering at his rocky prison like some confined demon, endeavouring to force his way to light and liberty.
The copper is found in an iron pyrites, and yields about five per cent. The stalactites are very beautiful ; for wherever the water trickles through the roof of the gallery, it forms icicles, as it were of emeralds, and amethysts ; but these bright colours oxidise in the open air, and are soon changed to a dun brown. When the Zafra, or rough ore, is extracted, it is taken to the Calcinacion, on the brow of the hill, and is there burnt three times in the open air ; the sulphur is sublimated, and passes off in clouds of smoke ; the rough metal, which looks like a sort of iron coke, is next carried to be smelted at houses placed near the stream, by whose water power the bellows are set in action. The metal is first mixed with equal parts of charcoal and escoriales, the ancient ones being preferred, and is then fused with Brezo, a sort of fule composed of cistus and rosemary. The iron flows away like lava, and the copper is precipitated into a pan or copella below. It is then refined in ovens, or Reverberos, and loses about a third of its weight ; the scum and impurities as they rise to the surface are scraped off with a wooden hoe. The pure copper is then sent either to Seville, to the cannon foundry, or to Segovia, to be coined.
