About water and its hydraulic artifices in the highlands environment: the case of Baños de la Encina, Jaén

En inglés:

Unlike it could seem, the name of this village, located in the southern part of Sierra Morena, does not have its origin because of a balnea (Roman bath) or a alhama (Arab bath), neither on the water abundance of the place. According to last studies the name of Baños de la Encina may derive of the phonetic transcription that the first Castilians made from the sound “banya”, name that Muslims gave to the castle of Baños de la Encina (hins banya), origin of the actual village. With the information that we have today, in the classical Arab its translation is “fortress with deep historical roots”, “ancient”, “with a lot of history” (we can not forget about the archaeological wealth of this piece of land). As Castilians listened the sound “banya” for almost a century (the time that Sierra Morena was the border between Castilla and Al-Ándalus) they began to pronounce the sound in a wrong way. By the time, the name would develop in this way: banya>bañia>baños; the same occurred with the demonym: bani-oscos>bañuscos.

Perhaps because of that deficiency of water and the great geomorphological diversity by the presence of the Falla de Baños, people in Baños de la Encina have created a huge number of ways to get and keep water for domestic, agricultural or industrial uses. This method to intervene in the territory looks like it would be Castilian, but in fact it has deep historical roots. It is important to know about the existence of hydraulic equipments with a great importance, like the giant cistern of Peñalosa (Bronze Age), that pick the rain and the waters that flow down the streets; the small “balnea” near the Roman small town of Santuario de la Virgen de la Encina, which water comes from the spring of Barranco del Pilar; two reservoirs made with mortar or “opus caementicium”, the Los Perales de Purita and the Polígono, today the first reservoir is the support of another more modern and humble used for watering, the second is the foundation of a small house of a mine made in the first part of the XX century; the double tank Almohad of the castle and the drainage catches of the Alcubilla, built with “opus signinum” with high strength and quality.

Is in the XVI and XVII century when the most part of the hydraulic artifices located in the surroundings of the village will be built, a rustic area called for most of the people as Los Ruedos. We can classify the hydraulic wells in five sorts by the use the water had: territorial management, domestic (drinking, cleaning, cooking, make bread, etc), traffic, agrarian and industrial. Taking part in this we can find places like: “callejas de agua” (Arroyo, Cuidado, Barranco) that used to empty out the streets without damaging them, the stone pavement trenches of the Campiñuela that used to drain the places of Los Charcones and Cantalasrranas and gave those places good shore for horticultural use; monumental wells like Pozo Nuevo and Pozo de la Vega, beside Camino Real (Royal Road) and supplied of water herds and flock of sheeps, the ingenious cisterns nd fountains located in the drop of Valdeloshuertos (Cayetana, Socavón, etc) that gave potable water for the residents: from little reservoirs, made in brooks like Rumblarejo to move waters to the old olive presses, to the water conduits and flour mills in the Rumblar river, they made easier the mill with a complex agricultural system to take advantage of the highland shores (roza de cama)...; to conclude emphasise that in the small area of historical set of the village, smaller than five hectares, we can find more than a hundred wells for domestic uses, the most part of them with almost monumental nature.

So many patrimonial elements does not only give information about the technical solutions used in different economic-cultural spheres and times in history, they also help us to understand more

complex processes , that in a local level, had given form to the history of this dry land. Water in an environment without karstic or nival regulation to control the changing seasonal conditions is usually quite appreciated by farmers and ranchers. It also show us the scarce and required that water is in a critical environment like this, that forces us to use water in a rational way if we want to have a sustainable behaviour. By the way, judgments against the ones that are used in olive trees cultivation.