When the telephone, electricity and running water reached Valsalobre

The school

In Valsalobre there was a boys’ school and a girls’ school in the building beside the spring. They did not mix even at break time. Each child brought a log for the stove every day, or two if it was small. If it snowed, the men cleared a path for the children to come down, and the teacher slept in the village.

One woman says she was kept in at break as punishment for not drinking the glass of American powdered milk given on arrival. There were few books: an encyclopaedia passed from one sibling to another. In the afternoon, girls sewed. When a married couple of teachers arrived, the pupils were mixed: the older ones went with the husband and the younger ones with the wife. Before that, a teacher gave evening classes to those who had worked during the day: one interviewee says his father went to school at night because he had been a shepherd since he was nine.

Over the years, the children went down to Beteta. A school bus driver remembers carrying about ninety children from several villages in the late 1970s; from Valsalobre, he says, none remain.

The telephone

The telephone was in a council-owned house in El Solano. A room was made for it, and one woman’s mother operated it. It worked as a switchboard: calls came from Cañizares, Beteta and other villages in the area, and the operator passed on the message and arranged a time for the recipient to come and speak. The person who had it could not leave the house. One woman remembers her father, who transported kaolin, receiving messages this way about where to load the next day. Villagers do not date it. A man who left for military service at eighteen says there was no telephone in the village then.

Electricity

Electric light first reached a few houses. One man says a 15-watt bulb was installed in his family’s house, and payment was per bulb according to wattage. His grandfather, who did not trust it, said switching on the light would burn the house down. And when he saw it always on, he asked how it was turned off. Another woman, who had a bulb installed in the kitchen, tried to light her oil lamp by holding it close to the bulb. One man remembers a woman watching a basketball match on the first television and asking, as she stared, whether the players could hear them. The other houses were lit with oil lamps, lanterns or candles, and oil cost money.

Running water arrived late. One man says it was «uno de los últimos pueblos de la provincia de Cuenca» (one of the last villages in the province of Cuenca) to get it, around 1984; a woman places it about fifty years ago. The two memories disagree and are recorded as unresolved.

The road

Until then there was no road. One villager’s father had a cart but could not go anywhere because there were no tracks. The road was built with pick and shovel, and was the first job outside sheep farming for a villager then aged eighteen or nineteen. Another also worked on the road up to El Tablado. The road brought the first cars and the pack animals gradually disappeared.

Leaving

Villagers remember the first people leaving for Barcelona and Madrid: a young man of seventeen or eighteen led the way and others followed. Some worked in a carborundum factory, where masks had to be worn, or in a mine, or with the kaolin lorries. Around 1970 many more left, and in 1972 and 1973, according to one villager, almost everyone. Many ended up in Valencia: a bus driver says a large proportion of the people from Valsalobre live in the Cristo neighbourhood. One woman received a grant to study for the bachillerato, the secondary school qualification, in Cuenca. They left, they say, because there was no work beyond farming and they wanted a future for their children.

What the census says

INE censuses tell the story in numbers: Valsalobre remained between 297 and 334 inhabitants from 1842 to 1960. In 1970 there were 215; in 1981, 65; in 2021, 21. One villager remembers the village having about five hundred inhabitants and between eighty and a hundred occupied houses, but no census figure reaches that number, and it is recorded among the unresolved questions. Today’s village is different: a dozen people in winter, and full in summer. One interviewee thinks working from home could bring some people back.