Single Coated

For whatever reason, that's the title I gave to the shot above these lines. That's just a wall of the building besides the one I work on. All the zone was previously one of the bigger (if not the main one) military quarters in Barcelona, dating from the XIX century.

That specific wall was on the vehicle entrance to the main courtyard and it still has the traces of some guard house on it. The most part of the quarter is now a public university (they replaced weapons with books, as somebody said once) but on the unchanged zones you can still catch a glimpse of its previous life.


I must admit I greatly enjoy finding traces of the long gone past wherever I go. That thing you see above is a huge grinding wheel used to turn the chalk mineral from the quarry in the background into easily transportable and useable powder.

That quarry is quite well hidden inside a small valley in the countryside zone of Spain I've been visiting year after year since I was a child (since it was our holiday's place), but it wasn't until last year that I recalled on an interesting point marked as a quarry in the zone map I had bought some weeks before.

It resulted to be a chalk quarry, operating for as long as people there could remember, and quite active up to the 70's. It provided with chalk mineral to all the surrounding villages, from where they came first with mules and carts and later, as I was told, with small lorries which were a nightmare to drive all the way along the very narrow mountain path.

Nowadays, both the quarry and the 'processing' facilities (read a rock oven and the grinding barrack) are long forgotten and left there until mother nature claims them to vanish completely in their surroundings.


Yet there's still enough trace of its very humble history as to satisfy a curious soul, you can still hear the echoes from the past.

Categorized: _blackandwhite | _color | _urban | _echoesfromthepast