The ghost town and the old underground explosives factory of La Torerera

@ElentirENG ES 8·08·2022 · 23:43 0

Spain is a country rich in mining operations. Many of them are now abandoned and have given rise to interesting ghost towns.

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One of them is called La Torerera and is located in the municipality of Calañas, in the province of Huelva. At the beginning of the 20th century, work began there for the exploitation of a pyrite mine by the Spanish Union of Explosives. The extraction of the mineral lasted only six years, from 1925 to 1931. Sulfur and copper were also extracted from there. As explained by Elmorante.es, in 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, the started the construction of an underground explosives factory on the site, also owned by Unión Española de Explosivos.

According to the aforementioned website, the underground explosives factory was made up of an acid factory, "with two sections of 13 shaft furnaces to burn 500 kg of pyrite each to produce 13 tons a day of sulfuric acid; the nitric acid factory (six tons a day); trinitrotoluene (five tons a day); nitroglycerin (workshop for glycerin nitration, stabilization workshop, filter screens, two workshops for joining other mixtures and ten booths for cartridge filling) and special explosives (workshops for drying and spraying of black and white mixtures).

The factory, then owned by Explosivos Río Tinto (after the merger of the Unión Española de Explosivos and the Compañía Española de Minas de Río Tinto), was closed in two phases in 1971 and 1973. In 1986 the farm was sold to the Junta de Andalucía. The always interesting Youtube channel Aventuras Entresierras has published today a video in which this ghost town and its explosives factory are toured:

You can see some screenshots of the video here. In this we see the enormous vaulted gallery of one of the explosives factory's magazines.

Here we see another vaulted gallery with remains of sulfur from the factory.

And here the remains of one of the buildings in the town that was next to the mine, today completely in ruins.

In this other video published by ElMorante.es you can see images of La Torerera when the factory was still active: