IRON

Our history marks the landscape of our environment. The quality of the iron ore and the industrial apparatus induced by this activity, which fostered a robust steel-metallurgical and naval industry throughout the left bank, have determined the type of society we are: plural, hard-working, supportive, and fertile. The changes made on the left bank of the estuary and its metropolitan area should not make us forget our land’s industrial and working-class origin. We must promote and preserve historical memory. The opportunity to have been born in this time and in this place gives us the inheritance of a part of the recent history of our country: what industrial and commercial activity has meant over the last 150 years, mining, shipbuilding, railways, the steel industry, port activity, commercial activity, navigation, the remains of those activities, the new landscape that was drawn, are the object of this attempt to rescue our most immediate History, captured in RIALIA, Museum of industry.

During the last quarter of the 20th century, we witnessed the dismantling of the industrial apparatus that, since the mid-19th century, had been the engine of expansion of our country and the basis of our socio-geographical configuration. The deindustrialization we have suffered should not make us forget that we are because we were. At RIALIA, Museum of Industry, we accompany you in discovering our industrial past and present.

«Aresti barely heard him, stunned as he was by the grandeur of the spectacle. It was an immense roar, which shook the roof of the workshop and made the earth tremble; an escape of forces and fire through the mouth of the converter, driven by the stream of compressed air that came from the immediate building, where the large injection machines were located. The boiling metal threw a whirlwind of sparks from the upper mouth of the bell, a bouquet of fire. But what sparks! What a fire! It was so immense, immeasurable, that Aresti already remembered the release of metal from the blast furnaces as an unimportant game.
[…]
The improvement of those people with the strikes and wage increases was only momentary. He believed, like Aresti, that this malaise had only one solution: change the organization of the world and proclaim Social Justice as the only law, suppressing charity, which is nothing more than hypocrisy that places the mask of sweetness over the present world’s cruelties.»

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. El intruso.