Puntos de Interés
Infrastructure
Portolés village (old church-school)
There are few railway infrastructures in Spain like the famous Engaña Tunnel. The construction of what was the longest tunnel in Spain for several decades, measuring almost 7 kilometres long, took 8 years of hard work.
A work of such characteristics, measuring 8 metres wide and 6.5 metres high, required the intervention of a lot of manpower. For this, free workers were employed, but also prisoners of the Spanish civil war, who worked from sunrise to sunset in order to reduce their sentences.
In order to construct this tunnel, shelter was needed for all these people, as well as their respective families, so two villages were built next to the tunnel’s entrances.
Portolés village, located on the Burgos side, received its name from the company from Zaragoza that was awarded the works: Portolés y Cía. What began with a series of barracks to house the workers, ended up becoming a real village in which there was no lack of services such as a police station, a church that also served as a school for the workers’ children, a hospital and up to a total of 3 bars. More than 300 people came to live in this village where there were even festivities that used to be celebrated with cinema and bullfighting.
Most of the contracted workers lived here, although the engineers, of a higher rank, were housed in some houses located next to Pedrosa de Valdeporres station.
Nowadays, nature has made its way into what is now a totally desolate place, where the undergrowth has become impregnable, taking over all the buildings, such as the church, which, completely demolished, barely preserves the crosses that help us to identify it.
