28.9.2013
The other cousin Antonio - Antonio González Rubio - and I went recently to the new Mine Museum in Arnao, the village where my great-grandfather Antonio Ribas lived and worked from 1910-1912. It is a great little museum, with a wealth of information about the Real Compañía Asturiana de Minas. The coal mine was the company's first venture when it was founded in 1833. In 1858, they opened the zinc smelter, where Antonio worked, and began using part of the coal they mined for producing zinc.
The museum visit started with an excellent hour-long guided tour of the village. This is the school. One of the Real Compañía's three founders was Belgian, and the company embraced the corporate paternalism popular at the time in his home country. Workers were provided with housing, medical care and schooling for their children. There was no public school at the time, so the company employees' children were the only ones in the area to get a good education, other than the children of people who were wealthy enough to pay for private school. Of course, the arrangement completely intertwined the lives of the employees with the company, which fueled much criticism by liberal reformers at the time (and still does among people on the left). Manuel González Cueto (the 92 year-old "jefe de clan" and Aunt Mary's sole surviving first cousin) worked for the successor company of the Real Compañía - at their big smelter in San Juan de Nieva, near Avilés - and cousin Antonio González Díaz attended primary school here.
These are teaching aides, in concrete in the courtyard behind the school. The students would gather around them as the teacher explained. Sort of nineteenth-century PowerPoint presentations.
The subjects:
Grammar.
Roman numerals.
Geometry.
Topographical geography of Spain...
...and Asturias...
...and the World.
The house of the company director, on the highest hill in the village. The houses of the mid-level managers were a bit further down the hill, and the worker housing was nearest the bottom. The village layout reinforced the social structure of the paternalistic system.
The museum is in the old castillete de mina, which was the building which housed the lifts that transported the miners to and from the mine galleries. The mine stretched out under the seabed, which meant that to the usual coal mine risks of exploding coal dust and roof collapses was added the threat of threat of drowning if the seawater broke through. Seawater seepage eventually forced the closure of the mine in 1915. Between the castillete and the cream-colored building to the left is a brick shaft - now covered in plexiglass - which was the base of the ventilation chimney. They used the same process as the Romans did 2000 years ago: a ventilation shaft ran along the length of the gallery and sloped up to a chamber in which a big fire was kept burning; the heated stale air and smoke rose from the chamber and out the chimney, creating a circulation which drew fresh air into ventilation holes at the opposite end of the mine.
Among the many exhibits in the museum were photos documenting the history of the mine and smelter, as well as artifacts from the facilities. This one, for example, shows the company entrance...
...and the shield in the center of the photo now hangs on the wall of the museum.
This is looking up into the tower of the castillete, and the giant wheels hoisted the mine lifts.
One of the nineteenth-century lifts (and a bit of the glass modern one, at the lower left, which takes visitors down the claustrophobic brick-lined shaft to the restored upper gallery of the mine).
Down in the upper gallery of the mine. A truly terrible, cold, dark, damp place. It is above the waterline and is the only part of the galleries that is not flooded now. It is a maze of little tunnels like this one, with the entrances to the lower galleries blocked up with stone.
This is looking down through a grate in the gallery floor. It was creepy. Although it is not clear in the photo, the surface of the water is just below those lights. The light-colored metal structure to the left is under the water, and the light and ladder disappear into the murk. The mine galleries stretched for a mile under the seabed, and down there are all those flooded caverns. Antonio said it would be the perfect place to set a horror novel.
We emerged from the mine through a steel door at beach-level. On the left is the modern jetty. In the nineteenth-century it was larger, and this was the port from which they shipped the coal that was being used for heating and other industrial purposes all over Asturias. The coal for the smelter, which is a little less than a mile away from the mine, was transported from the castillete by narrow-gauge railway. The cars first were pulled by burros and later by steam engines.
After the museum, Antonio and I continued on beyond the jetty to the Platforma de Arnao. It is a geological formation by the water, up against 30-meter bluffs, with millions of fossils. I have never seen anything like it in my life. And it is just out there by the Cantabrian Sea.
Slate, on the way to the Platforma.
The Platforma and some of the fossils. I was amazed by how industrial many of them looked, like screws, springs and washers. These fossils are as hard as concrete.
This one is part of the trunk of a prehistoric palm tree.
Antonio, on the Platforma. You would never guess we are related.
