Portal de Las Torres de Cotillas
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La Florida, today the Torreño neighborhood of more than 800 inhabitants, having as its Patron the symbol of the unity of Spain the Virgen del Pilar celebrated these days and located in the confines of the municipal boundaries with Alguazas and the Mula or Riacho River, emerged at the end of the first decade of the last century in the vicinity and under the protection of one of the pioneering canning industries of our Region, taking as its name the brand that marketed this factory owned by the Mallorcan family Vicens.
Thanks to the interview conducted in 1997 by scholars of the ethnology of our land, Fulgencio Saura and Ángel Riquelme, the last of this business saga, Gaspar Vicens Marqués, for the prestigious magazine "Cangilón" published by the Association of Friends of the Museum of the Huerta de Murcia-Alcantarilla, we can know the reasons that led this Balearic firm to settle in our Region.
Gaspar Vicens y Pons, founder of the brand and initiator of one of the precursor industries of the Murcian conserve and of a generation of entrepreneurs represented by his son Lorenzo Vicens Roselló and grandson of Gaspar Vicens Marqués, would raise in 1900 his first offices and factory activity in the Alicante city of Orihuela and then incardinated in Alguazas.
The choice of these lands to locate their factories obeyed both the quality of the cultivation of the "Bulgarian" species of apricot that proliferated in the Huerta del Segura and considered one of the most exquisite in Spain - and, therefore, demanded since the end of nineteenth century in international markets such as French-like the presence of a wide variety of other fruit trees also requested by palates as demanding as Europeans.
It is so that these entrepreneurs from the Mallorcan town of Binisalem and dedicated there in its beginnings of industrial almond and other agricultural products in 1916 would choose the town of Alguazas to start up its first factory dedicated to canned processing and its packaging in metal cans of the apricot pulp as well as tomato that offered the fertile vega segureña, in particular this original factory occupied the facilities of the mill owned by the Serna family in the neighboring Villa.
Given the success and extraordinary prestige achieved by the development of this select canned product under the brand name "La Florida", the Vicens crossed the Riacho to place their production center in 1919 to a more suitable environment when it comes to having facilities more spacious and would be in vacant land of what is now the Torreño neighborhood homonymous to its seal of quality.
Specifically, in an area of ​​70 x 24 square meters, in four naves of 6 meters with roof raised with tiles and forms brought from the municipality of La Union, from a warehouse recently closed by the mining crisis.
In 1935 an annexed ship of 8 x 50 meters would be built to be used as warehouse.
A quarter of a century later one of the original ships would be demolished to settle in its place two adjacent ones of 70 x 12 meters with járcena or beam in the middle.
The land of the company that was available outdoors exceeded 3,000 square meters.
France and Belgium were the destinations (sea way in embarkation in the Port of Cartagena previous terrestrial transport in expeditions conformed each by two wagons and reatas of six or seven beasts) of 95% of the pulp of apricot and the half whole fruits for cakes to which a quality control of the highest precision was applied through a laboratory that calibrated the manufacturing and packaging process for a final stage to transfer such monitoring to the CEBAS-CSIC of the City of Murcia.
The outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 led to the seizure of the company by a committee of the anarchist union CNT (National Confederation of Labor) and the consequent return of the Vicens family to their Mallorcan land of cradle.
With the return to normality that represented the end of the fratricidal conflict and the return of the owners to the factory, the brand "La Florida" expanded its supply of manufactures to almost all types of preserves (peach, peas, artichokes, jams, etc.) ) that were exported to France, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom via trucks and / or rail).
In short, the semblance of a neighborhood that owes its origins and a large part of its history and identity to a reference quality mark of one of the first-rate flagships of the contemporary Murcian economy: the canning company.
Source: JJRM
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