Fire and earth: ironworks, lime kilns, tileworks and ochre mines

Four elements

The old mountain ironworks could be understood almost literally through the Greek philosophers’ four elements. Earth: iron ore. Fire: the charcoal that reduced it. Air: bellows feeding the embers. Water: the wheel driving bellows and hammers. Alto Tajo had everything: ore, forests for charcoal and powerful rivers.

Iron from the mountains

Cueva del Hierro mine, in the Serranía de Cuenca, was worked from around the 6th century BC, and later by Rome. Centuries afterwards, a 1632 dispute over Beteta’s iron mines shows how the Crown granted deposits across Tierra de Molina, “eight leagues around”, to people close to the king. In the 1960s, Cueva del Hierro’s ore still supplied the Beteta blast furnace.

In Peralejos de las Truchas, beside the Hoz Seca river, stand the Morencos ironworks, a large 18th-century building where iron renowned for its hardness was forged for generations. Nearby, Puente del Martinete preserves in its name the giant hammer that struck iron to the rhythm of water. In Lebrancón, the La Herrería recreation area recalls another forge.

The woods paid the price. A study of an ironworks in the Serranía de Cuenca estimates that sustainable operation would have required cutting over fourteen hundred hectares of woodland each year to make charcoal. The more modest village smithies lasted longer: they forged and renewed the cutting edges of resin-tappers’ axes. The blacksmiths of Cobeta, Villar de Cobeta and Ablanque were renowned throughout the district.

Glass that left the village

In El Recuenco, sand and fire produced another kind of object: bottles, flasks and jugs. Then came the journey. Sellers loaded the pieces into large baskets and travelled from village to village for months; some sales were paid for by barter.

María José Sánchez Moreno found fragments of crucibles and glass of various colours while investigating the old furnaces. Those fragments brought a lost trade closer. The nickname sopleros, glassblowers, used for the villagers, also preserved its memory. Orders for El Escorial and the lives behind the workshop continue in The village that made glass.

Lime to whiten the world

Lime was used for mortar, whitewash, disinfecting animal pens and even in vegetable gardens. It was obtained by firing limestone for days in a calera, a stone kiln that had to be fed constantly with woodland fuel. Near Villanueva de Alcorón, on the left of the road towards Zaorejas, a group of lime kilns survives, some restored. They are visited on the Caleras de Villanueva route.

Earth in the kiln

Local clay produced tiles and bricks: more than thirty-five tileworks have been recorded in the Geopark. Earth also built entire houses. In Tierra de Molina people used rammed earth, walls compacted between boards, already employed by the Celtiberians of El Ceremeño, and adobe, particularly on upper floors and in grain-storage rooms.

Peñalén’s ochre

In Peñalén, among the Utrillas sands exposed beside the village, Santa Engracia mine operated until 1936, a small source of pigments for paint. Miners entered horizontal galleries with rails and carts, seeking the clay layers richest in iron oxides. They ground them, roasted them in kilns and obtained a range of ochres sent out in sacks on mules.

The white sands of those same layers had another, more domestic use: moistened and rubbed with a scouring pad, they whitened the wood in Molina’s houses and brought out its grain. Cleaning was also a way of making things beautiful.

The hand left in the tile

At Arbeteta’s tileworks, workers ran wet fingers over the pieces before firing. Those marks bring the work close to an everyday object: a house’s roof also preserves the gestures of its makers. The story continues in What a roof tile can hold.