Spanish Colonisation Villages in the Province of Granada (1939–1977). Agricultural Infrastructures Inserted in the Urban Fabric: Tobacco Drying Houses

Abstract

The Spanish domestic colonisation of the 20th century was a territorial planning project which followed a policy of recovering agricultural land and making it habitable, according to an innovative collective model for rural exploitation. This colonisation by the Spanish government led to the creation of approximately three hundred colonisation villages throughout the country between 1939 and 1977. The new architecture played a fundamental role because of the relationship it established with the productive landscape. The novelty of this colonisation settlements led to the creation of an urban model that combined the agrarian and architectural structure within a reinterpretation of what rural life and its collective working means.Exceptionally, there are cases in which collective elements linked to agricultural exploitation were introduced into the urban fabric. This particularity is found in two villages in the province of Granada, Peñuelas and El Chaparral, where a group of twenty tobacco drying houses constituted a singular architectural element of transition between the agricultural and the urban layout. Tobacco drying sheds are part of the agricultural heritage of the fertile plains of Granada and their scattered implantation throughout the territory makes them recognisable landmarks in the landscape due to their scale, construction typologies and formal characteristics. The refined structure of these vernacular constructions houses the tobacco leaves drying for months. Their functional precision resides in the lattice panels that, whilst allowing air and light pass through, constitute breathtaking spaces. This gives them an appearance that unexpectedly creates continuity with the modern architecture of the colonisation villages.This paper presents a cartographic and photographic research carried out on these two atypical grid layouts of drying sheds, which generate a sequence of transparencies separated by streets as social urban places combined with their productive nature. This exercise of displacement and repetition constitutes an unusual reinterpretation of an agrarian infrastructure that links modernity with the agricultural legacy.