Energy Aftermath
Barruelo de Santullán, Castilla León| Location | Spain |
|---|---|
| Period | 2025 - ongoing |
The town of Barruelo de Santullán wants to repair the wounds left by the mining industry
The town of Barruelo de Santullán, located in the north of the Castilian-Leonese province of Palencia, is one of the 184 municipalities affected by the decarbonization processes that the MITECO (Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge) has been carrying out over the last few years throughout Spain. This public policy is carried out with the aim of moving towards a green and low-carbon economy, in order to minimize the negative economic and social impacts caused by the abandonment of polluting industries.
During the heyday of coal mining, approximately 12,000 people lived in Barruelo de Santullán, linked in one way or another to the mining industry. Now there are only 1,200 people living there, most of them retired from the mining industry and their families, who are trying to adapt to a territory with too many empty houses in a state of abandonment, in spite of having a quite important housing problem. Some of them want to understand what is the material and immaterial legacy that their ancestors bequeathed them, in order to leave to those who succeed them something they can use to avoid repeating the dynamics and mistakes of the past. And they want to devise it from the concepts of socio-environmental reparation, spatial and territorial justice, rethinking what is required to live from the co-responsibility with the human and more-than-human in a territory in which coal mining has been replaced by work in the biscuit industry in the nearby town of Aguilar de Campoo.
A group of people, who live or descend from Barruelo de Santullán, have been meeting in different ways and thinking about what they can do, and have found a series of wounds they want to repair. Wounds in which the memory is very present. A memory that serves them to think about the future.
Memory of the October Revolution of 1934, which divided the people in two and which, nearly 90 years later, continues to be very present in their conversations.
Memory of the mining families and their ways of inhabiting and shuttering the houses due to the lack of space because of the orography of the town.
Memory of women, whose stories have always been denied and that, despite the present historical moment, is still hidden under the epic stories of the miners and their work.
Memory of the places taken away by the speculation of the owners of the coal extraction industry, who have turned the old industrial center into a closed and abandoned place, when they are communal lands and streets where the neighbors used to walk and live, and that they want to recover at all costs.
Memory of the coal dump, very present in the imaginary of the locality, that one day the authorities decided to eliminate without consulting them, just as they did with their struggles, their livelihood and their illusions.
This group, mostly made up of women, want to think with an artist, in the way that from art they can create a creation of restorative justice that serves as an impulse to take the reins of the future and continue repairing this territory.
- Profiles
- Mediators
- Alfredo Escapa
- Commissioners
- Barruelo de Santullán Villagers
