Where's the Past?

In the neighboring town of Lousame, up in the hills, there is an old mine. About fifteen years ago, my husband and I went to its abandoned headquarters to check out the ruins. It was a decaying fly caught in the flypaper of time. Some of the buildings were falling apart, the roofs caving in. Many of them were surrounded by briars and impossible weeds. There was a building with compressors, another with unidentifiable machinery, a well head, offices, what seemed to be workers' barracks, and a few other buildings and

The low building to the left is the office.

houses, one of which was occupied. It was strange, being able to squirrel into some of the buildings, such as the workers' barracks. They were attached, simple, two-story homes. In one that we could enter, the occupants had left some things in the kitchen, and in a room there were old schoolbooks from the 1970's. In the offices there was a little window where we assumed the workers collected their pay. There were many papers, still, that we sifted through. Unfortunately, we never revisited the interesting ruins.

Now the office is a garden.

Since then, they've recuperated the area, and made a museum from the abandoned buildings. I visited yesterday. I almost wish I hadn't. Granted, that when we went there were briars as tall as a house and hidden pieces of machinery we had to skirt, thankful we had had our tetanus shots. Cleaning that up was a good idea. But what they did to the buildings is a travesty done to history. They not only cleaned out the briars and the weeds, and got rid of the dangerous, rotting pieces of machinery, they also laid out delicate little paths, with gardens and even children's swings. The buildings have been denuded of their character and painted different pastel colors. They have been labelled with painted signs that look like a "New and improved!" sticker on a box of detergent. The family that had been living in one of the buildings had bought what had been the foreman's house next to the offices. They fixed it up and demolished the offices. Where the neuralgic center of the mine had been there is now a vegetable garden. Signs have been put up describing each building in Castillian, Galician, and English. God help the English speakers. The barracks have been completely gutted out and the building is going to be dedicated to a restaurant and cafeteria. I had always thought a museum was dedicated to teaching about the past through preserving it and keeping things as close to the original as possible. Whoever designed that museum in Lousame should be shot. They've desecrated something that played a large part in the history of this region. 

The barracks then.

At the end of the nineteenth century a British company set up shop there and started to extract tin. The San Finx Tin Mines Limited set up shop at the Phoenicia mine in 1890. It was the first tin mine in Spain to open, and the last to close, almost a hundred years later. It became a busy mine and remained in English hands until the end of the Civil War. At that time Franco nationalized it and apart from tin, tungsten, also abundant, began to be mined there. 

The mine was a breakthrough in many senses. It brought the first telephone line to the township of Lousame. At the end of the nineteenth century it had one of only two magnetic separators in the world. The other was in the United

The barracks now.

States, from where the one at Lousame had been brought. It was where the one of the first unionizations took place in industry in Galicia, in 1918, due to terrible working conditions and deaths of workers from silicosis after just a few years on the job. It was a point to which many people from even Portugal or other parts of Spain came to work. It became the biggest extractor of tungsten in Spain around the middle of the century, and one of the biggest in Europe. Over a thousand people made their living from the mine, legally and illegally.

It became the center, during the Civil War, of anarcho-sindicalists, who would engage in guerilla activities against the Civil Guards, defenders of the Nationalist side. Union activity had dwindled during the 1920's, after the establishment of the CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores), but after the declaration of the Republic in 1933 it picked up again. Sindicalists at the mine fought for better working conditions and health care. My grandfather was one of the workers who joined the union and became active. It earned him a sentence of twenty years for rebellion (later parolled). Others met their death after taking to the hills, from where they joined maqui units.

Then.

In a sense, many people of the surrounding towns and villages should either thank or curse Franco and Hitler for signing an agreement at Hendaye in which Spain would supply Nazi Germany with tungsten in exchange for tons of gold. Because with this agreement, the mine started to feed many desperate people. Not everyone worked at the mine in an official job. Many went up to the area and started digging up tungsten on their own, which they would then sell. The German buyers didn't really care who they bought from, they just wanted the tungsten. Those who dug up the tungsten on their own sometimes met their death in impromptu tunnels that collapsed on them. Others made a lot of money. But it was dangerous, because there were guards stationed around the area. Their orders were to shoot in the air to scare off those who went to steal from the concession, but they weren't overcareful over just how much they lifted their rifles to fire the warning shot. One night, a pregnant 18 year old girl was shot in the back and killed. There was a guard that was much hated and feared, called O Marelo. Whenever the rumor got out that he was in the area, everyone would vanish into the night. This guard didn't hesitate to corner someone to demand part of the loot. If whoever he caught didn't hand over enough, or even if he did, the guard would beat him unconscious. They were scary, desperate times. Everyone participated in the "roubacha", even children. Some families became rich from what they stole. Others made enough to keep starvation away from themselves and extended family.

Now.

With the end of the World War, tungsten stopped being so appreciated in the world market and the prices slumped. They went up again during the Korean War, but the hordes of people in the night weren't as numerous, and, eventually, the area became peaceful again. Towards the 1980's tin and tungsten stopped being mined, and the are was used as a gravel quarry, crushing the rock that had been moved to form the various tunnels. Finally, this stopped in the 1990's and the mine lay quiet and forgotten. Now, however, it's been bought by a large corporation, Sacyr, and operations have begun again. But the days of the mine as the mainstay of the local economy have gone and won't return. 

You can tell from the technicolor buildings that the past has been buried in the galleries beneath them.