The La Maquinilla Association is the doyenne of the groups defending the Industrial Heritage of the Guadiato Valley, in the province of Cordoba. Its headquarters are in the town of Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo, a town once rich in mining and industrial resources and currently home to some of the best and most endangered examples of Industrial Heritage in Andalusia.
It has been registered in the regional register of Associations since September 2011. The reason and origin of this organisation lies in the abandonment of both tangible and intangible elements of the mining basin, and especially the largest set of industrial brick chimneys in southern Spain in the area known as Cercos.
In order to enhance the value of this heterogeneous and at the same time interrelated heritage, it was decided to undertake the Guadiato Greenway project on old abandoned railway lines with the aim, firstly, of making these degraded areas accessible in safe conditions, secondly, to bring the local citizens closer to their identity in a healthy way and, thirdly, to create an incipient ecological and environmental tourism product around the old castles, railway stations and abandoned factories.
As a result of this initiative, the La Maquinilla Greenway (8km) was created in 2014, between Belmez and the Peñarroya Industrial Complex, and the Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo Greenway (3.2km) was recognised in 2015, in the town centre, linking numerous railway and industrial remains, as well as the Fuente Obejuna Greenway (4km) in 2017. In 2018 La Maquinilla achieved the greatest achievement to date since its foundation: the recognition by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Peñarroya-Puertollano railway line as being of general interest by the State, which means that the public authorities are committed to allocating resources within their means to the recovery of this old line as a natural path.
Since the creation of the La Maquinilla collective, 1.5 million Euros have been invested in greenways in the Guadiato Valley in the long-awaited Greenway of Guadiato and Los Pedroches. This money has been invested in social employment and in the contracting of local companies, which fully justifies the public utility of our association and the economic viability of the project.
In parallel to this work, it launched the A-cércate project, an intense educational and advocacy campaign in educational centres and local, regional and provincial institutions to recover the industrial brick chimneys of Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo and protect the cultural assets related to the industry that exist in our region.
La Maquinilla’s most outstanding event, due to its emotional and visual impact, is the Día del Cerco (Day of the Seine). This consists of the symbolic and simultaneous lighting of the 9 brick chimneys of the Industrial Fences of Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo with coloured smoke with the aim of building a positive image of this Heritage among our neighbours, drawing the attention of our authorities to the importance of conserving the chimneys as an icon of the municipality and offering a modern and optimistic image to those who look at us from outside. It is held on the 4th of December every year, the feast of Santa Bárbara.
Its latest project has been the restoration and night-time illumination of the chimney of the old paper mill through a crowdfunding project in which more than 500 local citizens and 120 companies have participated. The initiative, which raised more than 17,000 Euros, has been awarded by the European Federation of Industrial Heritage Associations with the Industriana 2018 label for the best social rehabilitation project.
Although it started with a handful of people, La Maquinilla Association currently has 40 members and collaborators who carry out various maintenance tasks on the recovered sections of the Greenway, informative through the publication of content on the blog lamaquinilla. blogspot.com, education in different schools and institutes, as well as research, with the publication of the book La Maquinilla: ferrocarriles de Belmez y Peñarroya, 150 años del ferrocarril en Belmez or the translated reedition of the Cincuentenario de la Sociedad Minera y Metalúrgica de Peñarroya (Fiftieth Anniversary of the Mining and Metallurgical Society of Peñarroya). In 2020 it has published a didactic guide for children and teenagers about the Industrial Fences of Peñarroya and an App that allows you to visit the site in three languages.
The motto of this group, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2021, is “follow the chimney”, in a clear allusion to the importance of this imposing and slender brick massif as a unifying element of wills and dreams in our town.
At present, the La Maquinilla Association has created the Interpretation Centre of the Guadiato and Los Pedroches Greenway in order to boost this infrastructure from a tourist point of view, disseminate the history of the Peñarroya-Puertollano railway and make the building a cultural reference at a local level.
