The Guadalquivir River and its surrounding area have been a site of intense urban activity since the founding of Roman Córdoba in the 2nd century BC until the 20th century. Its banks served as the stage for a constant flow of men and women who needed to use its waters for various activities, ultimately transforming the river into a veritable urban artery, another street among those that crisscrossed Córdoba’s neighborhoods. Its use was structured around four main groups of activities: exploitation of natural resources, harnessing hydroelectric power for industrial purposes, commercial traffic, and everyday activities.
Natural Resources From the perspective of natural resource use, the river provided the inhabitants of Córdoba with a wide variety of river fish, including mullet, chub, shad, sea bass, flounder, eels, and shrimp. These fish were caught using nets and boats, or in fish traps and enclosures where they were kept inside large pots. This practice is documented from the anonymous Manuscript of Jerome in the 15th century to Madoz and Ramírez de las Casas in the 19th century. Hunting, particularly of waterfowl, has been practiced along its banks since antiquity. The surviving permits for hunting turtledoves and partridges in the reedbeds are linked to the importance of the reed and wicker harvesting for construction and basketry.
Industrial Activity
Regarding industrial activities related to the Guadalquivir River, noteworthy are the facilities that harnessed the force of its current to capture hydraulic energy for powering the machinery of watermills or flour mills, dedicated to grinding wheat and barley, or hydraulic fulling mills, devices where large wooden mallets moved by a camshaft were used to beat and stiffen woolen cloths with clay and soap, an operation designed to prevent the fabric from unraveling after use. Paper mills are scarcely documented in Córdoba, and although they are assumed to have existed during the Andalusian period, between the 10th and 12th centuries, their use after the 13th century is unknown. The only certainty is the operation of a paper mill at the San Rafael mill, owned by Lorenzo de Basabru between 1810 and 1840, which is documented in Madoz’s Dictionary.
Mills and fulling mills were associated with weirs or dams that served to retain the current and channel the water. These weirs have been located in practically the same places since they first appeared in the 8th century. Dams that also served for the installation of waterwheels or water lifting devices for the irrigation of orchards: Las Grúas, in the municipality of El Carpio, a magnificent work built between 1560 and 1568 by Diego López de Haro, where three wheels extracted water for the irrigation of orchards owned by the Marquis of El Carpio; the Albolafia, a river waterwheel that, in the Cordoba of the 14th and 15th centuries, served to raise the water of the river for the irrigation of the orchards of the Alcázar, restored in 1965 by Félix Hernández; The waterwheel that, since 1883, provided water to the Alcolea Sugar Refinery, and the turbine of the Count of Torres Cabrera, which supplied water to the Santa Isabel Colony on the Castillo de la Isabela estate, since 1870.
Further downstream are the Lope García dam and mill, a magnificent nine-stone mill that replaced the old medieval watermills in 1605; the Carbonell mill, located near the historic Vado del Adalid ford, which housed the Santa Cándida flour mill during the first half of the 20th century; and the Martos mill, built between 1555 and 1565 by the Order of Calatrava, which owned the mill since the Christian conquest of the city in the 13th century. The mills located below the Puente Mayor (Albolafia, Enmedio, Pápalo, San Antonio), which are attested to from the Emirate period by Andalusian authors such as al-Jushaní or al-Razi; those located next to the San Rafael Bridge (San Rafael and San Lorenzo, on the left bank of the river, Nuestra Señora de la Alegría, next to the current Botanical Garden); and the Casillas mill, next to the current Abbas ibn Firnás bridge, where in 1894, under the sponsorship of the Carbonell family, the eponymous Light Factory was installed, which provided the first public electric lighting to the city of Córdoba.
The navigable river
Navigation on the Guadalquivir River is documented from Roman times. Its reach was greater in Antiquity (when boats could easily reach Andújar), but was reduced during the Late Middle Ages (when the river’s navigability forced the city’s port to be located at Aguilarejo, near Cortijo Rubio and Majaneque). Navigation was very limited from the beginning of the 16th century, when the increasing deterioration of navigable conditions led to well-known reports such as the one written by Fernán Pérez de Oliva in 1524. The most commonly transported goods were, in the Seville-Córdoba direction, iron from the Basque Country, and, in the opposite direction, raw materials such as wool, hides, wheat, oil, tanning agents, and dyes that reached various European markets from Upper Andalusia.
Within this context, the river transport of timber, particularly pine trees for construction, acquired extraordinary importance. These trees were transported, either in logs or whole, from the Cazorla and Segura mountain ranges by pine haulers such as one Pedro Román, a resident of Úbeda, who, in 1503, hired several hired laborers in Córdoba “to serve him on the river, carrying pine trees from Segura to this city.” Madoz records the last transport of pine trees along the Guadalquivir River as being destined for the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville in 1764, but we know that some other transports took place during the 19th century.
Daily life and leisure
However, not all the river’s relationship with the city was economic. The population also used the riverbanks for activities related to daily life, to the everyday routines of the residents.
Before the construction of the River Wall, built between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the southern section of the city wall served not only as a military defense for the city, but also as a defense against river flooding, acting as a protective bastion for the surrounding neighborhoods.
Although it wasn’t the most common activity, the occasional collection of water from the Guadalquivir River and its distribution throughout the city is documented. For example, in 1498, the minutes of the Córdoba city council ordered water carriers to always collect water above the mouth of the Arroyo de las Moras stream, and a year later, in 1499, Luis de Berlanga, a resident of the Magdalena neighborhood, sold to Alfonso Gutiérrez, a resident of the Santa Marina district, a Black slave from Jolof named Bucar, and a dun donkey equipped with its water carriers and jugs, “to draw and sell water from the river in this city.”
Or the washing of clothes. Or the recreational bathing. Those of us of a certain age probably remember swimming in the Guadalquivir River during our childhood summers, perhaps near the Casillas mill, or perhaps at that “Cordoba beach” that existed in the 1960s next to the Martos mill. This practice perpetuated a custom of the people of Cordoba, one that was already celebrated in the 11th century by Ibn Zaydun, the poet of the Taifa courts of the Banu Chawar in Cordoba and the Abbadids in Seville, when he alluded in his verses to “the still waters of the Malik waterwheel,” where the people of Cordoba went to bathe. Or simply to delight in contemplating the waters, the verdant banks, the silence of the shores, like the author of the Manuscript of Jerome when, in the 15th century, speaking of the Albolafia waterwheel, he asked, “Who does not delight in the evening silence, hearing the sonorous creaks of its axle?”
Because the relationship between the city and its river, the interplay between water and people throughout history, has forged truly unbreakable bonds between the city’s inhabitants and the Guadalquivir River—bonds that new generations must not relinquish.
If any reader wishes to delve deeper into this subject, they can consult the volume *The River and its Interrelation with the City and its Neighborhoods*, edited by J. Cosano, *Neighborhoods in the History of Córdoba: From the Late Medieval Christian Parishes to the Present-Day Neighborhoods*, Córdoba, Royal Academy of Córdoba, 2019, pp. 137–164.
