The British presence remembered in this year's Huelva Feria

The British presence remembered in this year's Huelva Feria
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By h.b. - Jul 24, 2010 - 1:34 PM
The Rio Tinto mines brought the British to the area in the 19th century

Part of the Rio Tinto mines - EFE

The Fiestas Colombinas 2010 which are held between July 29 to August 3 in Huelva are this year dedicated to the British legacy in the region.

The British presence came in the form of the mining ‘Rio Tinto Company Limited’ which exploited what many considered to be the oldest mines in the world, with legend claiming these are the famous King Solomon’s Mines.
In fact there is an area known as Cerro Salomón today, and local villages used to have the name Zalamea.

The mines were sold to the British by the Spanish Government in 1871, and the British soon were exploiting them to their fullest, extracting all the sulphur and copper they could.

They built ‘Bella Vista’ a village to be used only by the British workers, where houses in the British style were constructed complete with gardens and tennis courts. The Spanish called it the ‘colonia inglesa’. The village can still be visited today and holds a church and mining museum, and is found a few kilometres away from the town of Rio Tinto itself.

The British also created a football pitch and a golf course along with another village of half-timbered bungalows for mine workers at Punta Umbria on the Huelva coast. Was it then when the British holidaymakers love for the Spanish costas began?

The 936 square metre Castea de Exposiciones in the Huelva fair this year will show photographs from the time, complete with much documentary material.

The rest of the fair will have 63 casetas or marquees, decorated with 142,000 low wattage light bulbs.

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