The windmill of Tío Manuel Lambertos in Los Alcazares
The mill was used in the early 20th century to provide water for crop irrigation in Los Alcázares
The old windmill of Tío Manuel Lambertos in Los Alcázares is a largely ruined conical structure close to the Torre de Rame, which was built out of simple mortar and stone in order to extract water from the underground aquifer channels in the area and use it for the irrigation of crops on the land which had not been expropriated by the military authorities.
When it was first built it was very close to the seaplane aerodrome of Los Alcázares, which was founded in 1915, and the building known as the “house of Ramón Franco” (brother of the man later to rule Spain for 36 years, and also a leading aviation pioneer).
It was owned by Manuel Lambertos Olmos, who was born in La Palma in 1861 to Manuel Lambertos and Florentina Olmos, and his wife Josefa García Soto, from Pacheco, but the first reference to a mill was one which was already in a ruinous state in 1908. The structure we can see today was erected by Manuel’s son, Manuel Lambertos García (1889 - 1967), who married Rosario Jiménez Castejón and had 6 children.
It was this couple who gathered the materials necessary for the wheels, mechanisms, sails, ropes and so on, and then built a new mill next to where the old one had stood. Alongside they built their house, which in the 1940s was occupied by their daughter Rosario Lambertos Jiménez, who oversaw the collection of water in a storage pool before it was channelled to an irrigation storage area.
Eventually a second well was dug to provide drinking water for the donkeys and oxen used to work the land as well as to cultivate more crops, and so Rosario Lambertos oversaw the workings of an innovation which was crucial to the local economy at the time – it was on account of this and other mills that products such as broad beans, melons, peas, cotton and tomatoes spread throughout the area.
Infrastructures of this kind were made unnecessary in Murcia by the completion of the Tajo-Segura water supply canal in the early 1970s, which allowed the vast expansion of crop farming in the Campo de Cartagena and the creation of the agricultural landscape we see today.
Similar mills are in abundance throughout the flat plains of southern Murcia in the municipalities and towns of Fuente Álamo, Cartagena, La Unión, El Algar, La Puebla, Torre Pacheco, Los Alcázares, San Javier and San Pedro del Pinatar, and they still punctuate the flat landscape so regularly that it becomes routine to see them as you drive through the countryside!
Close by to the mill of Manuel Lamberos are those of El Pasico, Hortichuela (near Santa Rosalía), the “Molino Perea” (Balsicas), the “Molino Garre” (Dolores) and the “Molino de Elisa” (San Javier).
