Visit to Minas de Riotinto

Last Thursday, 7th November, the English Department and some students went to Minas de Riotinto to visit Bellavista District. They spent a great time and learnt many things about Riotinto Mining Museum and a Victorian House.

The town of Las Minas de Riotinto has always been based around, and dependent on, the mines themselves which give it its name. Las Minas reached its peak of prosperity and importance in the late 19th/early 20th century, when the British were running the mines.

Riotinto is also famous for the local poet and writer Juan Cobos Wilkins. His bestselling novel El Corazón de la Tierra (The Heart of the Earth),  based on the story of a popular uprising at the mines in 1888, was recently made into an Anglo-Spanish film.

An English Letterbox 

Victorian House 21 

 

The House was inaugurated in 2005 and it gives you the opportunity to do a flash-back journey to the Victorian times and taste a flavour similar to the one that you can see in legendary films like Out of Africa and a Passage to India.

This semidetached house of 540 m2 presents the following disposition:

• GROUND FLOOR: Daily live area (dinning room, living room, hall, front and  back garden). Service area (kitchen, pantry, woodshed and servants bathroom).
• FIRST FLOOR: (bedrooms, office and bathroom).
• SECOND FLOOR: (servants’ room, lumber room and play room).

Apart from the main rooms, two display spaces have been installed. The first one has been set up in the office and was designed to show why and how the district was built, how many construction stages were needed to complete it and how many buildings compose the neighbourhood: dwellings, Presbyterian Chapel and the English Club). The second display room is situated in the old play room and shows through pictures the daily life of the British inhabitants during eighty one years of presence in the town (reference link.)