Art & Culture
Cultural Heritage
The environment of the smelting Ajuria and Urigoitia in Araia (Asparrena, Araba) is one of the most beautiful industrial sceneries of the Basque Country: Dams, forests, coal bunkers, ships…
It is one of the first iron and Steel industry of the country, placed in the Aizkorri-Aratz Natural Park, a place where nature and industry are inseparable.
Although in Araia other foundries existed earlier, the complex of smelting “San Pedro de Araia” or Ajuria’s factory, like meets it at present, was most emphasized from all. There was installed to himself 1er electrical stove of induction of the whole state and one of the 1st blast furnaces of Basque Country as well as its 1st modern iron and steel company along with that of Bolueta in Biscay.
The Ajuria factory has supposed several milestones along its history, between others it emphasizes that in 1929, it should turn into the only company of the state that kept on producing sweet iron for the procedure of the puddling, and from 1933 it stayed like the only ingot producer to the charcoal. In 1906, it put in functioning the first electrical stove of Spain to make Steel.
At the end of the XIXth century its owners constructed the dam of “The Nacedero”, to obtain a major profit of the hydraulic resources of the area.
In shot, the Ajuria factory “contribuited like innovations an analysis of the technological changes in the iron and steel industry, a Deep knowledge of the markets – absolutely stranger up to the date – the birth of the industrial cartels, a wide information about the standard of living of the workpeople and the strategies of a family Enterprise to reinvest the profit. Of those benefits of the plant there went out important signatures as Ajuria and Aranzábal, the Azucarera or La Iberia, original nucleus of Blast furnaces of Biscay”.
