El Ingenio de Montserrat
El Ingenio de Montserrat
It is an old sugar mill located on the outskirts of the Spanish city of Almería. It was inaugurated on February 27, 1885, designed by the engineer Bover Muntadas. Its machinery, weighing about 350 tons, was powered by steam machinery, manufactured by James Watt's company.
The façade of El Ingenio has been preserved and restored as a place of historical memory.
The project, however, soon ran aground, because the meadow was not transformed into that sugarcane field as the promoters believed and the water from the Mamí and the lighting of new wells was not enough to handle the work.
The farmers of La Vega did not venture to change their traditional garden crops for sugar cane.
In 1889, the company Cumella y Compañía, directed by Fernando Cumella and José Molina Sánchez, and owned by the Marquis of Cadimo, Felipe Bustos, Miguel Barbatín y Careaga and Miguel Ruiz Soler, recovered the business with a capital of 1.1 million pesetas. His intention was to operate the Montserrat Mill to manufacture beet sugar, according to the new trends of the period. They acquired machinery supplied by Fives-Lille and planted 2,400 tahúlas of that species, but the project failed again.
It was not the last attempt: the Gómez Sánchez y Caro company acquired the facilities in 1895 trying to cajole the farmers, advancing the seed and fertilizer at cost, with the guarantee of the Almeria bankers Ulibarry and Peydró, who guaranteed each farmer the harvest.
One hundred hectares were planted, to which were added lands from Fiñana, Abla and Abrucena and a stop was obtained for the new Linares railway line that facilitated the collection work. It only operated profitably for a few years, with a production of three million kilos in 1900 as its main milestone.
Starting in 1904, the Sociedad General Azucarera de España took charge of the property of the Ingenio de Montserrat, initiating a process of concentration into a trust that caused the Los Molinos sugar factory to be dismantled, despite its modern machinery that was transferred to the Ingenio de San Torcuato de Guadix where the beet harvest was most abundant.
The shortage of raw materials was again the key to its third failure. The Ingenio farm had an area of 13 hectares and had a notable building with tanks for honey and sugar, carpentry and blacksmithing workshops, silos for pulps to feed dairy cows, a carbonic acid boiler, stables, haylofts and 21 homes for workers.
During the Spanish Civil War it was used by the republican authorities as a prison for people affected by the military and religious uprising. Later, during the Franco dictatorship, it served as a prison, in which more than 7,000 people were imprisoned, including political prisoners, in conditions of terrible overcrowding. The number of those shot is between 300 and 400 people.
Religious act in the El Ingenio prison after the end of the Spanish Civil War.
El Ingenio de Montserrat in 1890
Barrio de El Ingenio in 2024
Today, only its main door is preserved, protected as a place of historical memory and it has become a regular place for the memory and tribute of the republican victims during the Franco regime.
If you want to stay in the neighborhood check out our 2-bedroom apartment in Ingenio.