A day trip to the mining village of Corrales

Today’s outing was to the small town of Corrales, just across the bridge over the Odiel River from Huelva capital. To understand the importance of this former “company town”, it helps to dip into a bit of background on what was going on in the latter half of the 19th century.

It’s the 1850s and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. The thirst for metals — particularly copper for engineering, and sulphur for making sulphuric acid for the booming chemical industry — was unquenchable. The Cornish copper mines in the South West of England were fast losing their dominance, and the race was on to secure new sources of raw materials. The British Empire was at its height, though closely followed by the USA, Germany and France, all of whom were fast catching up.

Into this context stepped a French engineer named Ernest Deligny, who arrived in the province of Huelva in February 1853 on behalf of his employer Decazes, the 2nd Duke of Glucksborg, looking for possible mining projects. Long story short: since Riotinto was still in government hands and opportunities there were limited, he travelled the province and rediscovered some ancient mines near a village called Alosno. He named them Tharsis, convinced they were the biblical mines of Tarshish, and set about exploiting them.

By 1866, however, the venture had not been a commercial success. The difficulties were formidable: cholera outbreaks, sweltering heat, unreliable investors, disagreements over management, hundreds of mules needed to haul ore across brutal terrain, and a chronic lack of capital to invest in a railway — to name but a few. The company had little choice but to seek a partner. They eventually turned to Charles Tennant, the Glasgow industrialist behind the St Rollox Chemical Works. Tennant managed to raise the necessary capital and, together with a group of like-minded industrialists, formed the Tharsis Sulphur and Copper Company Limited, taking possession of the mines.

The success of any mining venture in the province of Huelva depended on a fairly demanding set of conditions: enough capital to build a railway, a wharf or loading dock to transfer ore to ships waiting in Huelva harbour, advanced technical know-how, and of course a robust market for sulphur and copper. By 1871, a 47-kilometre railway had been built to the Tharsis mines, along with an impressive loading wharf jutting out into the Odiel river (as seen in the photos above).

Which brings us back to Corrales. It was chosen as the terminal where minerals would be processed and loaded onto ships bound for the UK. Before the company arrived, the area was little more than uninhabited marshland — perhaps the odd fisherman’s hut, nothing more. Over the years the company built the town to satisfy the needs of the Spanish workforce, the British staff and the installations needed to process the minerals, power the operations and operate the railway.

Pictured above you can see (1) the railway station built in 1920 and now used by the Aljaraque town hall, (2) the thermal power station (sadly in ruins) built in 1917 and in operation in 1918, (3)(4) the loading wharf finished in 1871, a masterpiece of late 19th-century European industrial design, recently restored and rumoured to be soon open to the public, (5) the cinema inaugurated in February 1953 by W.H. Rutherford II, the Managing Director of the Tharsis company, (6) The Casino, where I had breakfast this morning, opened in 1918, functioning as a vibrant cultural and recreational centerpiece, built explicitly by the Tharsis Company for its workforce, (7) Iglesia Regina Mundi, built in 1956, entirely financed by the Tharsis Mining Company, (8) a reproduction of a mining winch (malacate), even though Corrales didn’t actually have a mine, it was dedicated to railway logistics, ore crushing, power generation, and maritime shipping via the Tharsis Wharf.

If you’d like more info on Huelva’s British mining heritage, drop a comment in the box below.

19th Century Huelva Today

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