// Museo // Temporary exhibitions//Year 2023//A workers' town in the Sierra de Cádiz (Spain): the memory thread// From a workers’ town to a tourist village

From a workers’ town to a tourist village

From a workers’ town to a tourist village
Circa 1961. Carlos Guerra, Macrina Romero, Maribel Guerra and Mari Solera, residents in Los Hurones (Cádiz). In the background, Los Hurones dam and the cement silos. Photograph courtesy of Macrina Romero
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From a workers’ town to a tourist village

The cheap houses and most of the huts in Los Hurones disappeared beneath the reservoir or were swept away by the wind and rain. The town is the only previously inhabited area of the construction site dwellings that remains. Going back to visit the town is, for many families, like a pilgrimage. Who hasn´t walked around the streets and slopes in search of the spot from which, decades ago, you could see the symbolic elements of the dam?

«The feeling you get when you have been so happy in a place… we had a nice house, we had a school, we had everything. What more could we need?», María Fernández asks herself. «The end result of the dam was beautiful, and the place is idyllic… But for a visit; not to live and work in, not in those days. There was a lot of human suffering there!», Juan Manuel Román says.

It is to be hoped that the new tourist village of Los Hurones keeps the stamp of its origins and of the worker families who forged its identity: to dignify their lives, to recognise their essential contribution and to make sense of our present times.