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The San Rafael Sugar Factory (Hydraulic heritage)

Diputación de Málaga
Ingenio azucarero de San Rafael. Torrox

The San Rafael Sugar Factory (Hydraulic heritage)

The oldest of the sugar mills was the Alto de Torrox, which was used first by the Arabs and later by the Christians. When the rebellion of 1569 broke out, this mill, then in the hands of Christian and Morisco (Moorish converts to Christianity) owners, was burnt along with another sugar mill and three flour mills, figuring in the surveyor’s book as a building “in ruins”, having walls but lacking a roof. The Morisco Melilla family began building a mill known first as Ingenio Bajo and later San Rafael, but the rebellion halted its construction. Following the subsequent sharing out of Morisco possessions, Bernardino de la Reina received a quarter share in the mill from García de Melilla, which he sold to Pedro de la Barreda, another governor of Vélez, who completed the building. Sale records from 1626 tell us that the owner of the sugar mills in Torrox, Algarrobo and Nerja, was a certain Rodrigo de Tapia y Vargas, who lived in Seville.

Alto de Torrox sugar mill, rebuilt by Juan Triviño in the XVII century, worked until the first half of the XIX century. As for the Ingenio Bajo, on the 18th of August 1854, its last owner, Francisco Javier de León Bendicho y Quilty, Judge-Advocate and member of the Royal History Academy, ended almost one hundred years of his family’s ownership of the mill, recounting the story of El Ingenio de San Rafael from its construction by the Melilla family right through to the Count of Cavarrús, to its buyer, Martín Larios Herrero. Under Larios’ ownership, it continued working until 1945, producing 22,000 quintales (some 220,000 kilograms) of sugar per year. According to Ciríaco Fernández Acevedo, priest of Torrox in 1773, an attempt was made to industrialise the mill. Apparently, a certain Miguel de Gijón, a gentleman of Indian origin who had arrived in 1764, brought with him from London a machine made entirely of cast iron with tempered steel shafts and plates which had no wooden components or nails.

Today, the building, which is now in ruins, belongs to the SALSA construction company.

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