Several authors have written about the Río de Oro, the main waterway in Melilla, and have described it in their publications:
We will begin with the chapter dedicated by the official chronicler of the city, Antonio Bravo Nieto in his work Cartografía histórica de Melilla (Historical Cartography of Melilla):
"Man's contact and relationship with nature over the centuries allows certain geographical features to be assimilated into a completely historical reading.
This is the case of the River Oro, not so much for its modest proportions as for the fact that its mouth, very close to the city of Melilla, allows us to find it reflected in all the local cartography since the 16th century.
The River Oro, also known as the Uad Medduar (the one with the bends or meanders), originates in the Gurugou mountain massif, collecting water from the Taxuda plateau and the Taquigriat peak, with a catchment area of about 85 square kilometres.
Its reduced course of twenty-one kilometres initially heads northwards, but changes direction abruptly in the vicinity of the El Had souk, heading eastwards; once inside Melilla's territory, it is joined by several courses: the tributary of the Tigorfaten on the left (collecting water from several plateaus) and on the right the Frajana and Sidi Guariach streams; it is at this point that its course widens ostensibly, forming a fertile plain at its end.
Documentary references to the River Oro begin in the 15th century.1 In a map of 1564, its mouth was depicted as an estuary occupying a large part of the fertile plain of Melilla.
The author's vision of the drawing could correspond to the natural state of the mouth at that time, but also to a specific moment corresponding to one of its frequent floods. As far as the latter possibility is concerned, it could be supported by several documentary references which seem to indicate that, during certain periods, part of the riverbed would be semi-flooded, allowing the cárabas to slide along its bed, as happened in 1858.
In 1576, Juan Andrea Doria wrote to Philip II that between the walls of Melilla and the mouth of the river (part of the city's fertile plain), a large number of vessels guarded by the city's artillery and arquebusiers could be beached, since "it is flat land and by removing two or three small gardens, a whole armada can be beached without difficulty.
As far as its name is concerned, we will follow in part what the historian Gabriel de Morales wrote: "The documents closest to the time of the conquest simply call it the River or River of Melilla and this same denomination is used in the parish books ... ; however, on some occasions the river of La Olla is mentioned, and as there is no other river in the fertile plain of Melilla that deserves this name, it is clear that it is only to it that reference can be made [ ...] this name is used for the first time in a description of the square and the countryside that in 1677 was sent by the warden D. José Frías to S.M.". José Frías to His Majesty".
In 1692, however, Marcos de Ayala mentioned it as the Río de la Plata, but we have not found this name again in other documents. Juan Antonio de Estrada informed us in 1748 that it was called the River of Gold "because of some pints that usually extract the sands with this precious metal [...] and at its source they extract clay [...] to work pots, casseroles and other manoeuvres that come out with the aforementioned pints. They are highly esteemed in Spain for their workmanship and durability".
The existence and historical reflection of the river was present in the written and graphic documentation through almost always negative news: mentions of its floods, the attacks located next to it and the epidemics that its stagnant waters caused in the city.
Despite the modesty of its geographical magnitude, it should not be forgotten that this river has a torrential nature that has made it a dangerous neighbour throughout Melilla's history. In 1644, the priest Juan Bravo de Acuña described one of these floods:
On the eve of the feast of St. John, on the 23rd of June of the said year 644, at one o'clock in the morning, it began to rain, and the water increased for moments until about eleven o'clock that day, the river called "La Olla" came out towards "Macujar" of the fort of San Marcos and all that area of vineyards and orchards and knocked down the walls, broke down bards, cut down trees, buried some vines and discovered the roots of others, carried the harvest that was about to be threshed by the palms to the sea.
de la vega ... ".
These floods have been frequent throughout Melilla's history, recurring cyclically and causing multiple problems for the city.
Another of the dangers that arose from it was the facilities that its morphology presented for the construction of attacks and trenches on its right bank; these were used by the border guards to continually harass the city and were known as Ataques del Río and Ataque de Tarara. In this sense, its riverbed served as a kind of natural moat that favoured those besieging the city, as it offered numerous possibilities for ambushes in the abundant and thick vegetation of reeds in its meadow.
In 1677, Governor J osé Frías stated that the Río de Oro was a very deep place, completely covered with reeds where anyone could easily ambush. This image, which associated the river with attacks, can be seen in a map of 1697, which already depicts various trenches and earth mounds at its mouth.
In this sense, we also find documentary references to the customary work of going to the river to cut the reeds, both to prevent the growth of these natural shelter walls for possible aggressors to the city, and to use them in the manufacture of faginas and fortification baskets. In the 19th century, this task of cutting reeds in the river was known by the Cuban term "chapear".
Finally, the proximity of its waters to the city and the unhealthy stagnation at the mouth of the river led to several epidemics spread by mosquitoes.
Thus, in May 1754, Melilla suffered an epidemic of tertiana which was blamed on the "emanations of the river water", and in June 1774 the same happened with malarial fevers.
The perception of the Río de Oro was not without a certain negative charge, as a natural phenomenon that did not help the good defence of the city and that was difficult to control by human means.
Juan Antonio de Estrada, referring to Melilla, said that "it is also bothered by a river, with the sands that it casts when there is a lot of rain... The mouth of the river is like a musket shot from the Plaza".
It was precisely these sands that were deposited on the mouth of the river, flood after flood, gradually clogged a large area of beaches bordering the city's fortifications. If in 1690 the waters of the sea were lapping against the faces of the bastion of San José, at the end of the 18th century there was already a beach in this area known as Mantelete beach.
The growth of the beach area along the river had a very negative effect on the city's defences, as this flank of the Fourth Enclosure was left completely uncovered and new fortification works had to be built.
In the last years of the 18th century, work began to be planned to extend this enclosure in the area of the river. In 1790, Gabriel de Vigo planned a fort with a battery between the tower of Santa Bárbara and the beach to contain the fires of the attacks; in his plan he already pointed out an ostensible deviation of the riverbed with respect to 1773, as well as a certain variation of the seashore.
However, the change in the final course had been caused by human means, namely through the earthen embankments, which acted as dikes, and the artificial planting of reeds to serve as a retaining wall, and for this reason the waters were slowly moving towards the left bank closer to the city walls.
The danger was obvious, for if the repulsed sieges of Melilla had achieved nothing through artillery warfare, nor through mine warfare, it seemed that from now on another strategy was being initiated: using the floods of the River Oro to destroy the walls of the Fourth Enclosure.
For this reason, the river came closer and closer to the city, multiplying all the problems we had seen up to that point. In 1792, the engineer Joseph de Ampudia y Valdés once again planned a fort in the same area in order to control the increasingly numerous attacks, and at the same time "fix" the front of the river's advance, and thus the base of the attacks located on its right bank. Thus, Ampudia wrote in the explanation of the project the justification for it, "with the aim of dislodging the enemies who are entrenched on the opposite bank and continually trying to approach the river".
more and more to her.
None of these forts would be built, and the problem grew worse and worse in the early years of the 19th century. In 1804, the mouth of the river passed next to the tower of Santa Bárbara, in 1816 near the gate of San Jorge and after the flood of 1837 along what is now calle Duque de Almodóvar.
The floods affected the city more and more, and were repeated cyclically in February 1816, February 1822, April 1840 (destroying the breakwater of San Jorge), February 1846 (carrying away a tower of the breakwater of San Jorge with a cannon), etc.
In 1834, the engineer José Herrera García had to carry out a project to consolidate the counter-scarp of the moat of the Santa Bárbara tower, as the floods were threatening to carry it away. Herrera's plan is really interesting as it shows not only the continuous movement of the riverbed to the left, but also its water levels. In the profiles he marked with the letters 0 -N (blue) the normal flow of the river and with N-P (light blue) the level of the floods, providing a truly novel piece of information in cartography up to that time.
Meanwhile, the besieging forces did not miss any of the possibilities that nature offered them and in 1840 they tried to flood the {oso de Santa Bárbara by building a channel from the river, and in 1853 they opted, however, to build a dike at its mouth so that the flood would inundate the Spanish fortifications. The state of the mouth of the river was really serious and the situation required undertaking a project that had been longed for by Melilla: the diversion of the River Oro.
José Herrera had already proposed this idea in 1834, but the projects began in earnest with the establishment of the boundaries in 1862. From then on, the city regained that territory of security that had characterised it for centuries, and the attacks and trenches were destroyed, definitively disappearing from its area.
The end of Melilla in retreat gave way to the beginning of the open city that demanded an end to this old problem.
In a plan by the engineer Francisco Roldán y Vizcayno, where he drew the entire outer countryside of Melilla, the place where the new riverbed was to pass was already indicated: between the hills of San Lorenzo and El Tesorillo. The most interesting thing about this plan is that for the first time the hydrographic network of Melilla was drawn in its entirety, with the main course of the river Oro and its tributaries, on the left the Tigorfaten stream and the ravines of the Cabrerizas mountains, and on the right the Frajana and Sidi Guariach streams.
Several wadis and streams had no defined course, some flowed directly into the Melilla plain and those on the right of the river flowed into the beach of Los Cárabos. Geographical control over the Melilla countryside is clearly reflected in this map, specifically the knowledge of all the water currents in the Melilla area in view of the need to build the line of external forts to defend the limits agreed in 1862.
The study of the works for the diversion of the final part of the riverbed and mouth of the River Oro was entrusted to the engineer Francisco Arajol y de Solá, who in 1863 would execute the preliminary project.
The report justified the works by thinking that the diversion would first of all eliminate the danger of diseases due to stagnation, and with the new channel, the devastating floods that destroyed the fortifications of Melilla would also be prevented, as well as preventing the port from being flooded. The river was diverted9 from the exact spot where it made a sharp bend that took it in an easterly direction (today's Camel Bridge), and a new riverbed was chosen and had to be excavated, located behind the San Lorenzo hill and the (now disappeared) Tesorillo hill.
The project was carefully studied by Arajol, detailing all the necessary excavations, as well as the type of stone-lined embankments that would serve to contain the water in the new channel; but it was still necessary to wait for the project to be approved.
a few years for the start of the definitive works.
On 22 December 1871 work finally began, and on 7 March 1872 the waters flowed through the new 650-metre-long bed, built in 73 days, which was sixteen metres wide (half the width planned by Arajol) and had a gradient of 2.30 metres; the work cost 45,000 pesetas.
However, these works were not completely definitive, as in 1885 another project was drawn up for works on the River Oro to prevent flooding, as the previous year there had been a very serious one that flooded the Mantelete huts, causing three deaths. The truth is that when the river flooded, the waters returned to the course they had always taken, which meant that the problem of flooding was repeated as in the past.
The works did not have to be completely definitive either because we continue to document overflows that affected the areas where the old riverbed ran in November 1886, June 1899 (the orchards and the Mantelete were flooded and the area had to be evacuated, also dragging along the wooden bridges of San Lorenzo and Camellos).
The flood of 28 September 1906 was disastrous. The wooden bridges were washed away and caused great damage in the Santa Bárbara area, where the waters reached a metre in height and it was necessary to break some sections of Wall X in order to get them out of the enclosure.
Thirty millimetres of rain fell in ninety minutes on that day, so that it has been
calculated that the river was able to drain 100 cubic metres per second.
On 23 January 1909, another flood occurred in Hernández Park, the esplanade and Santa Bárbara Street, which meant that part of Wall X had to be demolished again.
On 12 October 1912, the plain and the Mantelete were flooded again, and another bridge was lost, etc.
It is clear that despite the works, and bearing in mind that the width of the river was half that calculated by the engineer who drew up the initial project, the waters of the river tended to follow their natural course, which took them through the land currently comprising Duquesa de la Victoria Street, Hernández Park and then flowed into the Plaza de España, next to the walls of the Fourth Enclosure of the city.
Engineers, both civil and military, at the beginning of the 20th century already planned some solutions to improve the riverbed: construction of tree-lined avenues, canalisation of the water in the riverbed, and even (in a premonitory way) there were those who proposed covering the riverbed by forming an avenue in the upper part.
The Rio de Oro is still one of the elements that defines the reality of the city, and it is present in all its geographical representations, and is still very much alive today.
To be continued...
