What a roof tile can hold

Roofs of the same colour

All the old roofs in Arbeteta have the same colour. Their tiles came from the same place: Arbeteta’s tileworks, a kiln making roof tiles, bricks and floor tiles beside clay ground and a spring. It stood in the same place for centuries. Many villagers knew of it, but nobody could quite describe it, and vegetation had covered everything.

In June 2021, Juan Luis López and Lourdes Costero formed a group to look for it. They left their car on the track at kilometre 23 of the Valtablado del Río road, went around Pino Corona and reached Collado del Yeso, where Valtablado’s gypsum kilns stand. From there they descended without a path through the Tejar ravine, among pines, rosemary and gorse, along the course of the old road from Arbeteta to Valtablado. The ravine was dry, but as they descended rushes appeared, and even a poplar. After six hundred metres they found the kiln and, three metres away, the remains of the tilemakers’ house.

The house covered around 70 square metres and had two doors. Through the southern door the tilemakers went in to sleep. Through the northern one, closest to the kiln and drying ground, unfired tiles were rushed inside when rain threatened: a downpour could ruin days of work. The kiln is sunk into the slope, its stone walls lined with clay. The firing chamber is 2.90 metres wide, 2.40 long and 2.30 high, with the firebox beneath.

Ten thousand tiles before Saint Matthew’s Day

The tilemakers were outsiders, nearly always from Valencia and Alicante, hired by the council. In the preceding months villagers said how many tiles they needed; once enough orders had accumulated, the tilemakers were called. An escritura de obligación, a binding contract, was signed before a notary. In approximate figures, the tilemaker undertook to deliver 10,000 tiles to the village, enough for around 420 square metres of roof, at 75 reales per thousand, “made to full satisfaction by craftsmen who know their trade”. He arrived on 1 June and had to finish by Saint Matthew’s Day, 21 September. The council advanced 400 reales at the start, paid the rest within fifteen days of delivery and exempted him from residents’ taxes while he worked in Arbeteta.

Before kneading the clay, they prepared the kiln and gathered fuel: bundles of rosemary and pine branches, thoroughly dry, because the supply could not run out during firing. Sometimes neighbours were hired to gather it and paid in tiles; other neighbours paid for their tiles with grain from the threshing floor.

From clay to tile

The drying ground, north of the kiln, covered around 200 square metres. It had to be clean and smooth, spread with ash and rolled with a stone roller so that the raw tiles would not stick. Beside it, clay from the pit was spread to dry, pounded to break up lumps, sifted and stored.

Around thirty pitchers of spring water were poured into a large trough, with clay added on top, and left overnight. In the morning the mixture was trodden until firm, turning the lumps repeatedly to remove air bubbles. Then two people worked at a table. One dusted the gradilla, the flat mould, with ash, filled it with clay and levelled it; the tile then passed to the galápago, which gave it its curve. The other carried it to the drying ground, laid it beside the previous one and ran wet fingers along its back. Those marks can still be seen on Arbeteta’s tiles.

Each tile was 47 centimetres long, 22 wide at one end and 17 at the other, and a centimetre and a half thick. They dried in the sun for several days. Then they were placed upright and neatly arranged in the kiln. The doorway was sealed with stone and clay, and a layer of fired bricks placed on top with an opening for the chimney. The fire was kept going for around 36 hours, constantly fed, until the master tilemaker checked from above that the tiles were fired. The fire opening and chimney were then sealed, and the heat lasted at least another ten days. The authors estimate that each firing held around 4,000 tiles. Afterwards they were carried down to the village on mules.

The tileworks operated seasonally for hundreds of years, until the 1940s. The last tilemakers slept in the house of Manuel Herráiz and Telesfora Blasco, who were then living in Peñalén. The kiln lies in a pathless ravine covered in vegetation. To see its work, simply look at the village roofs.

The forge of Labros

In Labros, the old forge had a second life. In 1983 the Friends of Labros Association turned it into a community centre. Farm tools nobody used any more were stored there, and meetings, exhibitions, theatre and the village magazine were prepared. Andrés Berlanga recalled it in 2010, in a letter to El País denouncing the loss of buildings in Labros.

That is the same magazine in which Fernando Gutiérrez described the toys they made as children. Other village memories drawn from their local magazines appear in When the village could be heard and fire and earth, with the region’s lime kilns.