Evolución histórica y reconstrucción cartográfica de la distribución de las concesiones mineras en la sierra de cartagena-la unión

Abstract

From a mining point of view, the Sierra de Cartagena-La Unión, located at South-East of Region of Murcia (Spain), has been source of a great interest, which is already demonstrated by a large number of published studies having that topic. There are evidences about a significant mining activity extending over a period of more than two thousand years. Two main periods can be distinguished, one during Roman times, going from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D., and another in contemporary times, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the latter, the Sierra underwent a complete socio-economic and spatial transformation and became one of the fundamental productive mining districts of Europe. However, no publication has studied the mining activity of Sierra de Cartagena-La Unión from a fundamentally cartographic point of view. The cartographic and topographic information included in demarcation documents produced during the granting process of each mining concession can be used for this purpose. Those documents are available thanks to the regulation made by the Royal Decree of 1825 and subsequent laws. From this perspective, this area presents, due to the Spanish mining legislation of the first half of the 19th century and its particular characteristics, a degree of complexity rarely reached in other mining districts. The present study, which is intended for the reconstruction of the general plan of mining concessions of the Cartagena-La Unión mountain range, will focus on the last mining period, the one developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The successive phases in which mining planning was developed and the fundamental elements that conditioned it, both technical and legislative, will be revealed. Before undertaking the aforementioned reconstruction, it is essential to know, even in a brief way, the geology and history of the area, the legislation that governed the mining activity, the documentation to be used and the existing cartographic background of the Sierra. The most important of these is the map of the mines and transport routes of the Cartagena and La Unión district, carried out by Carlos Lanzarote at the beginning of the 20th century. This document has served as a cartographic reference, so far, of all research work carried out on that area. All of this will allow us to understand the evolution and behaviour of the demarcated area for mining concessions in the Sierra. The analysis of the cartographic and topographic information and the process of reconstruction of the general plan will reveal a series of limitations, errors and misfits. The result of those problems was the existence, at the time, of important duplicities and insurmountable demarcation problems. All of them will be analyzed in detail and solved when possible.