The village that made glass

Five hundred alembics for El Escorial

In October 1587, Guillermo Carrara, a Venetian glassmaker working in the furnaces of El Recuenco, accepted an order for El Escorial monastery’s pharmacy: five hundred alembics. Four hundred were for distilling and a hundred spares in case of breakage. His son Francisco also signed the undertaking. The order specified a mould, weight and deadline, and soon had to change: pieces were coming out too thin, so more glass was agreed.

In August 1589 the pharmacy paid for Carrara’s alembics and flasks; in November another village glassmaker, Julián López, appears delivering alembics. According to María José Sánchez Moreno, who studied the industry in 1997, El Escorial received over ten thousand panes of glass and hundreds of alembics and flasks during the 16th century.

A village suited to glass

El Recuenco sits in a bowl of hills on the Cuenca boundary. It belonged to Cuenca’s Sexmo de la Sierra until receiving town status on 10 May 1553, and passed to Guadalajara in 1810. It had what a furnace needed: pine woods, scrub oaks and undergrowth to burn, and sand at El Hoyo and Alto la Manta. A furnace consumed thirty loads of firewood in twenty-four hours. Barrilla, the saline plant helping melt the sand, came from La Mancha and Murcia because it was better than local material; six hundred quintales were needed annually.

The furnace, or capilla, had three openings and two levels, one for melting and another for annealing. At its centre the culerón burned resinous pine wood, surrounded by six crucibles, locally called morteros. Workers made these themselves, like potters, using coils of clay. Beside the furnace stood the botica, where mixtures were prepared, and areas for sand, barrilla, firewood and packing. A large animal-driven stone wheel ground sand, then progressively finer sieves reduced it to flour-like powder.

The glassmaker gathered a glowing ball with the caña, an iron tube 1.20 to 1.80 metres long, then blew and shaped it seated at the sillón, a bench with iron arms on which it rotated. Pincers narrowed the neck; shears cut the ends. When willow-peeling machines reached the village, those pincers retired into use as grips for stripping rods.

Blue-green

El Recuenco’s glass was dark blue-green, becoming paler when blown very thin and light. Many pieces had pinched edges forming an octagon. Some have a Venetian air; others are full of bubbles and imperfections. Its researcher says it did not seek to compete with Catalan or Venetian glass, yet maintained remarkably consistent quality for centuries, chiefly through two families, the López and Ruiz-Dorado, passing the trade from parents to children.

In the 17th and 18th centuries its furnaces supplied royal household bottles, demijohns holding up to two cántaras for palace water and wine, bottles for travelling coolers, fruit bowls, salad bowls, saltcellars, vinegar cruets, lamps and bell-shaped glasses, from an azumbre to an eighth of a cuartillo, called a half-cup. Production reached 30,000 dozen pieces a year. Ordinary glass used in Madrid, Talavera and Toledo came from El Recuenco and Arbeteta.

Who worked at the furnaces

Each factory employed over fifty people at times. At the head was the master, followed by skilled workers, apprentices, day labourers, night watchers, barrilla workers, glass openers, frame carriers, woodcutters and muleteers. Sometimes the whole village alternated farming and factory work, paid by the day.

In 1752 Pedro Ruiz and Juan Cano appear as apprentices, receiving food, footwear and a small wage. Manuel and Juan Redomero were glass openers. Redomero is a village surname from the 15th century, perhaps deriving from flask makers. In 1751 two widows, Juana de Heredia and María López de Aragón, are recorded as owners of leased factories.

Along the roads, carrying glass

Selling glass in Madrid was difficult. The Court’s glass merchants’ guild held retail privileges, and manufacturers and carriers could sell freely only during fairs. In 1740 an El Recuenco factory joined the guild for the first time, and Philip V granted the town a wholesale hall in Madrid. Carriers stayed at La Gallega inn and carried a document signed by the mayor certifying the glass’s origin: pieces were too delicate to mark. A glass costing six cuartos in a shop was sold by them for four. A load of hollow glass weighed sixteen arrobas; Madrid consumed a thousand loads annually.

The rest was sold from village to village. Owners entrusted pieces on credit to residents, paid on their return. Bottles, demijohns, pitchers, flasks and saltcellars were packed in coles, large baskets carried on backs or animals. Sellers spent months away, within and beyond the province, as far as Portugal. Payment was often in kind: meat, lime, bacon or carrying frames.

A village scattered with glass

The furnaces went out in the mid-19th century. In the 1960s emigration reduced around seven hundred residents to fewer than a hundred. No factory building remains, but glass is scattered throughout the village. At El Castillo, where Pedro Antonio López Romero owned a factory in 1761, green, amber, wine-coloured, colourless and bluish fragments appear among the slag. The Ozino district had at least two factories; El Altiyo, their waste mound, yields cuernecitos, porrón offcuts. The final factory stood on Calle del Río, where its grinding wheel survives. Many houses have crucible fragments built into their walls.

Much of the glass made here appears in museums under another attribution, because the village was little known. Sánchez Moreno identified seventeen pieces in the National Archaeological Museum, the Amatller Institute, Girona’s Art Museum and the Macaya collection; others are attributed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and New York’s Hispanic Society. In Toledo’s Hospital Tavera pharmacy, among Talavera ceramics, flasks with El Recuenco’s characteristic bubbles survive. In the village itself few remain: many residents traded them to antique dealers for plastic containers or threw them away as old things.

El Recuenco’s residents are still called sopleros. Other fire trades appear in fire and earth; the village’s recent life in A home to stay in.