“But, what’s wrong with ruins?” A tourist autoethnography of industrial heritage’s inevitable loss

Abstract

Since the arrival of French capital in the 1880s and the first third of the twentieth century, the town of Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo in a remote corner of Andalusia (Spain) became one of the most important coal mining and lead smelting sites in the world. However, the low profitability of these materials and other sub-products triggered the industry’s closure and rapid capital retreat in the 1960s. By 1974 the railway station was closed, and the town only retains a third of its population of its peak in the 1940s. Today, strip mines, the ruins of dozens of foundries, warehouses, power plants and administrative buildings are awarded the highest grade of Spanish heritage recognition. The town is active in promoting its industrial heritage on the international level, however, on the site that constitutes 25 per cent of the municipality’s total area, there is hardly any presence of explicit conservation measures, history interpretation, or control of access. It is sometimes used as a military training ground to simulate urban warfare, while the need to remediate severe soil pollution presents the most harrowing barrier for the recovery of the abandoned complex.

This presentation recounts a one-day visit during which the act of traversing Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo’s ruins turned into a highly immersive, sensorial, and reflective experience that, in the absence of a decoded institutional narrative, allowed us to generate our own imaginary of the place. Despite the evident sense of tragedy and nostalgia, and without underplaying townspeople’s sense of identity and loss, we approached the site deliberately as intrigued and previously uninformed tourists: what the municipality imagines could drive its future.

We came without much knowledge of the site, but with a familiarity with Andalusian culture and academic discourses on industrial ruins. We walked and reflected on the phenomenological and aesthetic fascination. Our theoretically-inflected reflections on—and through—this experience situates this work in-between experimental forms of autoethnography that stress ruined spaces’ performative potential, critical heritage studies, and the tourist gaze. Here, the role of subjectivity as a creative impulse is not at odds with scientific knowledge production: like the site itself, it dwells in the interstices. Consequently, by drawing from fieldnotes and photo-documentation, this contribution is presented in a story-telling format that challenges conventions of academic writing. Ours is an invitation to conceive the ‘here and now’ as a temporal layer that is as important as the past, praising the generative potential of that entropic heritage that cannot be saved. In dialogue with cultural geographers such as Caitlin DeSilvey, Tim Edensor, and Bradley Garrett, along with anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, we aim to further explore urban ruins tourism with a case that calls into question some of the assumptions driving these debates.