New Year's resolution 11: an airplane called Triana

Yesterday, we visited the Airbus factory here in Seville. We were able to see some of the airplanes being constructed (e.g. A400M) in the huge hangars that are situated close to the airport San Pablo. We were also told that building airplanes in Seville had a long history, some of which even coincided with Triana!

I had heard about an airplane factory at Calle San Jacinto and there is actually a small sign on the wall (just by the bar "El Tejar") commemorating it. A bit googling around and I found this neat blog post telling the story. By the way, the hangars are still there, for example two of them are used as gyms.

In short, in the beginning of the 1900's, a car factory was operating in the premises and they also constructed some airplane engines. The old picture above shows the logo of the original factory, "Fábrica Hispano-Suiza de Automóviles". That portal is still on Calle San Jasinto. The truck is transporting an airplane wing to a nearly airport called "La Tablada", situated a bit further down the river, where Matt still goes running.

The factory later became nationalised by Franco and called  Hispano Aviacion (which then later changed hands and is now merged with Airbus). The first plane constructed was called  HA-100 Triana (it was, btw, designed by a German called Messerschmitt - the name might sound familiar for the planes used in the second world ward?). Even if the first model was not that successful, it was used as a basis for the second model, called "El Saeta", which was more successful and also sold abroad.

Check the old advertisement with the drawing of La Giralda! A few links below about the planes and their history linked with Seville:

• El mundo (some mistakes with dates and names)
• El Saeta pictures
• some background about the Triana plane project 
• More history

New Year's Resolution 10: mountain spring water in Sierra de Aracena

Over a beautiful hike in Castaño del Robledo, which actually goes around the highest peak of the Aracena mountain range (969 m), we found this pretty looking water foundation near the parking place. It had a sign saying something about "agua de manantial" and we could not really work out if it meant that the water was drinkable or not...

In any case, we filled up an empty bottle on our way out and decided to check the word in the dictionary once at home - and before drinking the water!

It turns out that Aracena, which is part of the province of Huelva, has loads of spring water fountains. For example the peak that we hiked around, a very mellow hike btw, was formed due to volcanic activities and it has been able to maintain its hight because it is some sort of material that was resistant to erosion. It seems that this is also very good for filtering water, when looking at the hiking map over the whole region, there seems to be many springs around. (more information on the rock on this website "carbonate rocks, limestones and dolomites").

On the way home, we also stopped at a small and very cutre looking village called Fuenteheridos. Later, when looking for the word "manatial" in an online dictionary (= mountain spring water), I found out that Fuenteheridos has one very famous spring in it with a funny name: Spring of 12 canons (fuente de los 12 caños). I also found out that the area had actually lots of agriculture thanks to abundant flows of water, and that they farmed  lots of potatos back in the day when it was first brought in from the Americas! 

The water from the spring in Castano del Robledo was veeery good, btw, and it made me think why do we not have better sping water bottled available in Seville....? Business idea, anyone?