'EL POU DE GLAÇ' OF BEGUES, THE IMPORTANCE OF ICE

Today, The Grandma has returned to Begues, a place she loves a lot.

 

She has had a meeting with her friend Montse, and after eating some delicious loquats and taking some drinks, they have gone to visit el Pou de Glaç, a large circular plan structure excavated in the calcareous subsoil to fill it with snow or ice after the snowfall, in order to dispose of them during the rest of the year. Water is life, and obtaining and keeping it has been a human work since Prehistoric ages.

Begues is a wonderful place where you can discover the past, enjoy the present and plan your future if you like nature, peace and quietness. The town is a place full of kind people who are proud of their history and fight to conserve their heritage.

El Pou de Glaç is a large circular plan structure that does not retain the roof, which was possibly in the shape of a dome.

It measures 13 m in outside diameter (10.95 m inside) and has a preserved depth of 10 m. It is largely excavated in the calcareous subsoil, while the powerful walls are made of ashlars of limestone and sandstone, bound with lime mortar.

At the top there are two hatches, one facing west and one to the east, which would access the interior. At the top of the south face, there is a third opening, small and in the shape of a peat, which may have been used to introduce straw and the bowl with which they covered the ice. In the lower part of the well, on the north façade, there was a sewer that drained the water towards the Riera de Begues. This, however, is not currently visible, as it is possibly covered in rubble.

The location of this well is not free: it is located next to the stream, just at the end of the Pla de Begues, where the stream has already collected much of the water from the tributary torrents. At this point, in addition, there would be natural pelagic that accumulated water, favoured by the clayey and impermeable substrate of the sector. It is shady, a few meters above the stream and very close to the Via Mercadera, the road that connected Barcelona with Vilafranca and Tarragona, passing through Begues. In addition, this is the sector where the plan has lower altitude, and where therefore the thermal investment created by encircling the mountains produces the strongest frosts (-10 to -12º are not exceptional) and frequent (currently 40 to 60 days of frost per year).

More information: El Pou del Glaç de Begues (Catalan Version)

The refrigerator, freezer, snow house, ice well, snow well, well or cava is that construction made by drilling the ground in the mountains where it snows during the winter.

These holes, often rectangular but with an elliptical tendency, are made with the purpose of filling them with snow or ice after the snowfall, in order to dispose of them during the rest of the year. Usually a refrigerator was a circular well.

The upper part was closed with a vaulted roof that had openings to allow the introduction and extraction of snow or ice, although they sometimes had a lower entrance for the extraction operation.

It should be noted that the plant is between 10 and 16 meters long and between 5 and 8 meters wide. The depth is usually between 4 and 8 m. The construction protrudes to the surface approximately one meter and is all dry stone to conserve the snow as long as possible and to avoid that the formation of water by fusion affects the ice, since with the dry stone, the water could to go out.

These snow houses were always covered and included a porch or housing for snowmen, some walls, and driveways. Snowmen's paths are cobbled horseshoe paths.

 

Before there were ice factories, ice storage and distribution became an important business involving a significant part of the rural population. Examples are found throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

The activity of artificial glaciers has been known since Roman times; their great development took place between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they have been used until the middle of the twentieth century, when, with the advent of the first refrigerators, they fell into disuse.

Until now, food preservation was carried out thanks to brine, fertilizers, preserves or the use of snow. The latter system was the basis for a job and a profession that survived until about 1931.

In classical antiquity, doctors already prescribed the use of cold for medicinal purposes. This use recovered strongly in the Renaissance.

The most common therapeutic uses of ice have been: lowering the temperature in febrile processes, those caused by the cholera epidemic, as a sedative in cases of cerebral congestion and particularly in meningitis, to stop bleeding and as an anti-inflammatory or in trauma, sprains or fractures.

The progressive establishment of ice factories from 1890 in several cities was leaving aside the network of artificial glaciers and ice production taking advantage of the climate. Until then, it took advantage of a natural resource (renewed annually) sustainably, although depending on the climate, which gave times of ice shortage in front of others of great snowfalls that filled the snow mountains and day labourers.

Until the sixties, in the twentieth century, it was necessary to go and buy ice bars to feed the first domestic refrigerators. With the advent of refrigerators and the production of ice in industrial form, dependence on meteorology is avoided. The ice and snow warehouses, as well as the techniques of collection, storage, extraction and transport, were then obsolete.

More information: Mental Floss

History is not a burden on the memory
but an illumination of the soul.

 

John Dalberg-Acton