Different origins, similar life-paths

The men and women who have spoken to us about their daily lives arrived from different places: Andalucía, Extremadura, Castilla… Between 1949 and 1953 a group of skilled workers who were nicknamed los maños built the town where some of the workers were lodged. Some technicians and surveyors were from Catalonia, others from Madrid; and they hired around eighty quarrymen from Galicia. They came with their parents and brothers, sometimes with their grandparents, because family ties were a guarantee of stability and support.

Their life-paths during the long post-war years under Franco converge in hunger and scarcity. They tell us about the high infant mortality, about infectious diseases and successive moves to different workplaces, together with swapping and mutual support as a way to resist. Manuel Contreras was born in 1938 in Arcos de la Frontera. During the war, his father moved to an inn in the hills and in around 1942 they rented a plot of land. The presence of the maquis (anti-Franco resistance fighters) made life difficult and in 1944 they moved to Algar, where they set up a slaughterhouse. In 1948, barely 10 years old, Manuel worked for a man in Algar who made ice-cream and boiled chestnuts. In 1951, the family moved to the dam construction site, where he soon started working as a lathe operator.

Some families who arrived at Los Hurones came from similar building sites. Carmelo Cantillo (Santa María de Nava, Badajoz, 1938) who is posing with his younger sister in the photo, was eight years old when his family moved to El Pintao reservoir in Seville, 40 kilometers from his village. His father and elder brother worked on its construction. The building company had also erected a small town there, but they lived in a hut like most of the workers and their families. In 1951, their work on El Pintao finished and they moved to Los Hurones.