The Rio Tinto Company Limited (RTC) was one of the founding companies of the Rio Tinto Group conglomerate, which was responsible of the exploitation of the Riotinto-Nerva mining basin in Minas de Riotinto between 1873 and 1954.
It was founded in 1873 by British capitalists to take over the exploitation of a series of sites in the Riotinto-Nerva mining basin that they had acquired from the Spanish State that same year. During the following decades, the extraction of minerals in the area experienced a major growth, with the development of various mining and metallurgical activities. Under British exploitation, the Riotinto mines became "a world reference". The RTC was the builder and owner of the railroad line that connected the mines with the port of Huelva, where it built a commercial pier to facilitate the unloading and transport of the extracted material by sea. Likewise, the company had a great influence in the region and the province beyond the merely economic. The harsh working conditions of the miners led to numerous conflicts between them and the RTC management.
In addition to the Riotinto mines, the company expanded its operations to Africa in the 1920s. After the Spanish Civil War, the political and economic context in Spain became much more adverse, conditioning the future of the business. In 1954, the company's assets in Huelva were divested and sold to a local consortium, thus creating the Compañía Española de Minas de Río Tinto. Meanwhile, in 1962, RTC merged with the Australian company Consolidated Zinc to form the Rio Tinto-Zinc Corporation, branching out to other parts of the world.
Background
The area of the Iberian Pyrite Belt had already been exploited for more than 3000 years — in the Chalcolithic and by peoples such as Tartessians, Phoenicians and Romans, who extracted iron pyrites, copper, silver and other metals from them. As a result of the metallurgical operations, there is evidence that the Romans would have left more than fifteen million tons of slag in the Riotinto area during a period characterized by new extraction techniques with furnaces and new tools — such as norias or the Archimedes' screw — because, when the phreatic level was exceeded, it was necessary to drain the numerous subsoil waters. Centuries later, the Almohads did not work much on the extraction of minerals (blue vitriol and green vitriol) but they worked on the extraction of different materials to create dyes.
As early as 1556, the mines were about to be exploited again during the reign of Philip II, who needed to finance the numerous wars of the Empire. This attempt failed, since the studies of the time considered their exploitation unfeasible and unprofitable. In 1725, the Swede Liebert Wolters Vonsiohielm got the authorities to grant him the exploitation of the sites, under lease, for thirty years. During that time, Wolters would exploit the mines together with his nephew and a Spanish associate. The mines returned to the State in 1783, to be managed by the State again until 1810, when they were closed due to the War of Independence. Between 1815 and 1823, only the sour waters were precariously exploited. The failure in mining exploitation during that period can be explained by the difficulty, and above all the high cost, of transporting the minerals to the sea when there was still no railroad line and transporting them by pack animals was the only option. It was towards the end of the 19th century that the private initiative was interested in renting them again.Flores Caballero, Manuel. Huelva y su provincia, tomo 3. Ediciones Tartessos SL (1986)
Operational history
The acquisition of the mines
In 1873, the mines were bought by English bidders — who created a consortium for its exploitation — from the government of the First Republic (practically saved from bankruptcy by this sale) for 94,000,000 pesetas. However, it is worth mentioning that the foreign presence in the area dated back to the 18th century, with leasing companies such as Robert Wolters. The take-off of industrialization in highly developed countries had led various companies to seek new minerals and deposits for their growth. Likewise, the increase in employment needs caused a rapid growth in the area and even in Huelva. The reason behind the private interest in these mines has its origin in the new central laws of 1849 and 1859, overcoming a previous interventionist regime to move to a new one that greatly favored private initiative. But it was really the Ley de Bases de 29 de diciembre de 1868 sobre minas and the Ley de 19 de octubre de 1869 that favored the creation of private and industrial trading companies.
Thus, on February 14, 1873, after an unsuccessful auction, the mines were acquired through direct sale by an international consortium created, among others, by three powerful families, the Mathesons, the Rothschilds and the Goldschimidt — owner of the Deutsche National Bank of Bremen.González de Molina, M. y Pareja, A. La historia de Andalucía a debate: industrialización y desindustrialización de Andalucía. Ediciones Anthropos y Diputación de Granada. This consortium later found the Rio Tinto Company Limited, with a capital of six million pounds sterling. The purchase of the mines was accompanied by a concession from the State so that the British company could build a railroad linking Riotinto with the port of Huelva. Construction of the line was started in June 1873.
Beginning and expansion years Rio Tinto Company Limited's board of directors met for the first time in London on March 31, 1873, under the chairmanship of Hugh Matheson. One of its first decisions was the construction of a railway line, under the advice of the engineer George Barclay Bruce. The first years of the RTC were difficult: the shareholders had to make large investments and face strong criticism for the lack of profits. Once this initial stage was over, the situation underwent a considerable change. The British company — having obtained the rights to exploit the copper, silver and gold of the mines — initially brought about the resurgence of the region by opening new exploitation areas and developing inland mining. Its production, which left Spain through the Huelva estuary, turned the company into one of the largest in all of Europe and — in the words of businessman and historian David Avery — made Riotinto (in 1884) "the largest mining center in the world". By the late 1880s, control of the Riotinto company was transferred to the Rothschild family, who bet on increasing the scale of the mining workings.
At its peak, Riotinto became a small English colony thanks to the mine, a "Gibraltar sui generis", as the local writer and poet Juan Cobos Wilkins called it. The luxurious and exclusive Bellavista Neighborhood was built a few meters away from the excavations for the English personnel, which could be accessed after passing through a sentry box with guards; a Victorian style neighborhood that was equipped with tennis courts, golf courses, its own cemetery, a Social Club or even a Presbyterian church. Meanwhile, in the original Spanish town, the church or the Plaza de la Constitución — where years before the massacre of the "Año de los tiros" had taken place — ended up being buried under the slag from the excavations.
Huelva also underwent an important development under the English influence. The numerous workshops and facilities built by the RTC that employed more than seven hundred workers, such as the railway station, changed the appearance of the city and contrasted with the rise of a new bourgeoisie of both Spaniards and foreigners who were linked to the company. The power of the company became so strong in the city that the civil buildings depended on the interests of the company. Proof of this are the Reina Victoria Neighborhood, as a garden city that housed part of its employees; the construction of the Casa Colón, which ended up becoming headquarters for company offices, the disappeared Hospital Inglés, or the huge Rio Tinto Pier located on the Odiel river.
During the early years, the railroad was built in order to provide a cheap and fast outlet for the ore. By 1875, there was already a railway line linking the mine itself with the nearest exit to the sea: the port of Huelva. Thus, most of the wealth obtained from mining — it is estimated, for instance, to be half of the world's pyrite — departed quickly across the Atlantic to England, leaving a region in apparent progress but in reality, degraded by a fierce industrialization. Despite all this, the company's profits in the province were undeniable: in little more than eighty years it generated more than 54 million pounds of profit. The landscape impact of the mines was significant, as evidenced by the three immense open-pit mines that opened up into the ground. Filón Sur in 1874, Filón Norte in 1892, and above all Corta Atalaya, in 1907, then the largest on the European continent. By 1909, RTC had a workforce of 16,973 workers at Riotinto, employing almost a third of the population of the mining basin.
The growth of mining activities in Riotinto led the company to build several industrial facilities since the late 19th century, dedicated to the processing of ore. These included a sulfuric acid factory, a metallurgical plant (Fundición Bessemer) and a classification plant (Lavadoras). Likewise, a network of auxiliary facilities was set up: warehouses, ore loading bays, workshops, a railway network and branch lines, power plants, dams and reservoirs, etc. Over time, Riotinto became an industrial center of great importance.
By the early 1900s, the Rio Tinto Company Limited was already in a strong financial position and began to invest in strategic sectors. In 1905, it founded a subsidiary, the Sociedad Española de Productos Químicos de Huelva, in charge of the production of artificial fertilizers and superphosphates. The company was based in Madrid and had a production plant in Huelva. Around 1907, the RTC signed an energy agreement with the Sociedad Minera y Metalúrgica de Peñarroya (SMMP) to supply about 19,000 tons of coal annually, relying on the railway network of the MZA. Several years later, in 1917, the SMMP and the RTC participated alongside other actors in the founding of the Sociedad Española de Construcciones Electromecánicas, a company that the Rio Tinto company supplied with significant quantities of copper for its later metallurgical treatment. Added to all this was the agreement that the RTC signed with the British Tharsis Sulphur and Copper Company Limited in 1911 whereby both companies shared customers.
RTC's power and influence Practices carried out by the Rio Tinto Company Limited have been equated with those of a pressure group. From its early days, it made use of some deputies in the Cortes to act as intermediaries. However, from 1896, the RTC promoted the candidates of the Conservative Party for the districts of Huelva and Valverde del Camino with the idea that these, once elected deputies, would support the company in Madrid.
In Huelva province, it developed similar initiatives. For instance, in 1890 it actively supported along with Tharsis a "mining" candidacy to the Provincial Deputation formed by José María Parejo Bécquer and Vicente Ferrer Ramírez Cruzado. The joint purpose of this initiative was to get the repeal of the Albareda decree, that had prohibited open-air ore calcinations in 1888 because of the pollutants they caused. Leveraging the context that prevailed in the late 19th century, the company managed to have a net of representatives in the province that defended its interests, including names such as José María Parejo Bécquer, José Sánchez Mora or José Valero Hervás.