Benarosa Mill

ONE OF THE FEW MILLS WITH ANDALUSÍ ORIGIN

Benarosa's Mill belongs to the group of "River Mills", on the Guadaíra's urban bank. Technologically, it is a mill with a hydraulic wheel, in which water retained by a weir converges into the "buckets" or narrow spaces that contained the hydraulic wheels (in Spanish, rodeznos) that moved the stones which ground the grain.

It is one of the very few ones that keep its name of Andalusí origin (Banu Arusa); this, together with documentary references allows us to establish its origin before Castilian Conquest of the 13th century. The first news about the mill date back from 1253, when King Alfonso X gives to "Mr. Pedro Pérez, notary of Queen Juana, a house of mills with its weir and the wheel, being him the taker, that lies on Alcalá of Guadaíra, and was called in time of the Moors Abén Aharo's mill".

The same as it seems to happen to Guadaíra's other mills, nothing is left today from the Andalusí mill, since the building we see today is the result from the transformations and reconstructions carried out from the 17th to mid-20th century. Nevertheless, Benarosa's mill displays some particularities that make it singular inside Alcalá's miller bank. The building is set around a great tower of quadrangular floor-plan, used as store and house. Keeping downstream, you will find a building used like loading and downloading area of grain and ground flour. Over the stream the milling building is placed, covered by a gabled roof; in it there are the four stones of the mill.

It seems possible that from the 17th to the 18th centuries the great weir (re-built in 1998) dammed the water toward the buckets, in a similar way to other mills of the bank. However, upstream of the buckets there is a great trapezoidal pond; nowadays out of order that shows us probably a former period in the technology of the mill. Other examples of "pond mills" in the Guadaíra do not exist, although there are ones known in other places, for example at the Levante (Spain's East) region. In these cases, the pond mills are often dated back from the 14th-15th,so it is possible that Benarosa's pond were the only visible remain form the original mill of the Late Middle Ages. In this technological model, the pond is a brimmer, with a slope towards the buckets, making this way possible to stress the hydraulic force in order to make the hydraulic wheels' movement easier.

Over the level of flooding, on the right bank, you will find the Miller's House, a single building of rectangular floor-plan used like house and store until the end of the miller cycle, by mid 20th century.