19th-century industrial architecture related to the “olive grove revolution” in the province of Jaén, Spain.

Abstract

The image of olive grove monoculture that characterises the province of Jaén, and motivated the proposal to include “The olive grove landscapes of Andalusia” on the UNESCO Tentative Lists, is a landscape forged mostly from the second half of the 19th century onwards, when the change from polyculture to olive grove monoculture began. This transformation had various consequences for agricultural production, economy, society..., and also for the industrial architecture related to the production of olive oil. On the one hand, there were several “cortijos”, “haciendas” or “caserías” that had been mainly focused on the production of grain and started producing olive oil, leading to the reuse of the existing facilities. On the other hand, this “olive grove revolution” (the expression we symbolically chose to refer to this stage of economic change in this paper) contributed to the opening of new olive oil factories that introduced the most significant technological advances of the time from the second half of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century and that, sometimes, involved stakeholders of different nationalities. This paper aims to analyse, focusing on case studies, the influence of the “olive grove revolution” on the 19th-century industrial architecture in the province of Jaén (Spain) in a comprehensive way, i.e., considering its historical, economic and technological context.