Living to produce. The colonial habitat in the Western Andévalo (Huelva).

Abstract

Through a hermeneutic reading of landscapes based on our own methodology, we present the mining town of La Zarza, located in Andévalo Occidental (Huelva), as a significant example of a colonial habitat. With subsoils, soils and flights granted in perpetuity to foreign mining companies, where the proximity and overlapping of uses between productive plots and housing allows us to understand this type of colonial and hybrid landscape, in which the existence and evolution of the urban nucleus will always be subordinated to the exploitable extension of the mining seams. The growth of extractive and productive territories determines the successive locations of the residential centres, so that their urban plans will evolve in line with the advances of those seams and the current needs of the labour force.

After showing the physical-natural, territorial and perceptive keys that justify this type of paradigmatic mining colonization and presenting the specific case of La Zarza-Perrunal, we will demonstrate the colonial and dependent character of these implantations typical of mining productivist extractivims based on the aforementioned landscape reading of this urban centre, its mining cut and its surrounding areas.