The last vestige of Chilean nitrate in Orihuela

It was nothing more than 'poop' trying to survive in a world where artificial fertilizers were making their way, but its advertising image became an art deco icon in the last century. There was a time when Chilean nitrate, the “only” and “natural” one, populated even the most remote places of rural Spain. The rider on a yellow that simulated the dawn also arrived in Orihuela. As far as it is known, there were at least two posters and one of them, so many decades later, still barely survives.

In other autonomous communities, the protection of these advertisements has been seriously considered due to their artistic and sociological value, as was already done with the Osborne bull. Such is the case of Extremadura and the Region of Murcia, where the Huermur association went so far as to request precisely that from the Culture Department of the regional government, that these posters be valued.

The only one left in Orihuela is also at serious risk of disappearing, as is the building that barely supports it. This is the House of Bonanza. The exact date of its first construction of the last noble farmhouse still standing in the Orihuela orchard is unknown. One of the first testimonies of its existence is that it was already standing on a map that reconstructed the battle of Bonanza (1521), which, presumably, was fought in the vicinity of this farm during the revolt that took place in the city during the Germanías. It is even known that the mansion served as a sanatorium for those neighbors who contracted the plague. In 2021, the building as a whole, today subdivided and in the hands of at least three owners, entered the Red List of Heritage of Hispania Nostra, due to its multiple collapses in walls and roofs.

Evidently the nitrate cartel is much later in time. The ceramic murals that advertised this fertilizer with which fortune was made in large mines in Chile and Peru were manufactured in Valencia, in the El Siglo company, which remained active between 1927 and 1937. The design, for its part, was devised by a young architecture student, Adolfo López-Durán Lozano, around the year 1929.

Landslides

Since then, abandonment has already taken its toll on him. Some of the tile pieces at the top of this unique advertisement have already come loose. Its loss would leave Orihuela without the last witness of this product so popular in its time.

However, there was a time when he shared Orihuela with another 'brother'. The Chilean nitrate, the older ones remember, was also announced in a much more crowded place. Nothing less than next to the most photographed image of the city, that of the Levante bridge. Before the channeling of the Segura, on the weir, was the old Cox mill. There was another poster for the famous subscription there for decades. “It ended up on the ground in the 80s, when the developer Antonio Pedrera demolished the old mill to build homes,” recalls historian Javier Sánchez Portas.