Orcera: A maritime province?

In all of our many visits to Spain, only one village museum was ever open when it said it would be. Most were permanently closed. Today was no exception, but a kind employee in the ayuntamiento unlocked the door for us, and said that if we could work our way around the cardboard planetarium the school kids were constructing, we were welcome to visit.

The museum is devoted to explaining why a landlocked province like Jaén was named a maritime province in 1751. It turns out that the Royal Navy admired the straight, tall black pines as much as we do. In the interest of building ships to sail to and from Spain’s new colonies in the Americas, the forests of the Sierra de Segura were “terribly sheared by the intensive felling of their wood.” ‘Gancheros’ then drove rafts made up of thousands of trunks 600 km down the Guadalquivir to Sevilla. After the demand for wood for sailing ships dwindled, the trees continued to be felled to be used as sleepers for the new Spanish railway network. Good thing the Parque Natural finally came into being, so there are some trees left!Read more