Mining Ruins of Fontao, Spain
When we think about modern ruins, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a short-lived structure: an abandoned factory, a derelict housing block, a Cold War bunker. This is in keeping with the fast pace of supermodernity: things (even monumental buildings) are not made to last centuries but years; they are built and consumed fast and disposed of right away. There is no time for sedimentation or long biographies—as those of cathedrals, castles and historic cities. Many modern ruins tell us mostly about a single story (the development, heyday and decadence of Fordism in Detroit, for instance). They do not gather together different periods and life stories in the way a mound in the Near East or a Palaeolithic cave do.
Looking for archaeological remains of the Spanish Civil War and postwar period, Alfredo González-Ruibal recently visited the ruins of the Fontao mining complex in Galicia. The wolfram and tin ores of Fontao were exploited between 1940 and 1944 with political prisoners from the war, who were able to redeem part of their sentences through work in the mines. Forced labour was widely used by the Franco regime to construct railways, dams, roads, airports and irrigation channels. With a group of colleagues, he has studied a forced labour camp near Madrid, which fits well the image of the short-lived site of the recent past: the labour camp of Bustarviejo was built in 1944 and abandoned in 1952. This was the case with many other camps all over Spain. But not with Fontao.
In Fontao one finds a complex palimpsest which conveys an impression of extraordinary material and temporal messiness. The mines were exploited between the 1870s and the 1970s, with several periods of interruption and resumption of the work. There is no cut between the modern and the supermodern, between the historical and the contemporary, the venerable and the abject ruin. It seems that, like a living organism, the complex grew by accretion in the banks of the river Deza, concrete buildings emerging side by side of masonry walls and wooden shacks. Modern machinery lies abandoned along with vernacular houses. Steel and stone. This material accretion is matched by an equally bewildering addition of histories. Fontao is not just an episode of the postwar period in Spain or of the local industrial history. It is also the history of the second industrial revolution (the mines were first exploited by English and French entrepreneurs) and the major wars of the 20th century, which triggered the demand for strategic metals: from the First World War to the Korean War. Fontao was for over a century a hyper-industrialized and supermodern microcosm in the deep Galician countryside, a frantic mining town with cinemas, theatres and bars surrounded by oak forests, corn fields and farms. Today it is still an anomaly. A ruin out of place.
