El Nacimiento

Description

There would be no Cabra of the Holy Christ without this spring. With this very categorical statement I intend to highlight its enormous value, because those waters that have been irrigating our fields for centuries have brought the necessary energy to our mills, have gathered along their journey to long lavenders, have taken their waters to the abrevaderos, fountains and streets of the urban centre and not only to give to drink, but also to the domestic tasks, the works, or the irrigation of the gardens so characteristic of the interior of our homes.

The landscape is determined by human perception and is the result of the interaction of the elements of nature and man, then human action has conditioned the transformation of the natural landscape and the inclusion of cultural elements that give it value, so it is necessary to preserve and enhance them. We are therefore facing a natural resource that has allowed not only subsistence but also economic activity since man arrived on these lands.

It is now difficult to imagine what this spring and its immediate course would be like without that interaction by which human beings have created a laundry room, which is what we now see in the Birth, or downstream in the Matias and the Birth mills, in the Balsa, the Charcón, the Pileta and Arroyo launchers, or the numerous pools and the network of waterfalls for the irrigation of the place known as the "Site." At some point these infrastructures must have been created and we are likely to have to reassemble long before the repopulation of the Cabrilla Site. Today we will deal only with the environment closest to the Birth, so the relative to what we find downstream of this stream that so much life has spread since time immemorial will be part of the future of a new post.

To try to imagine what those places were like not long ago, when they still fulfilled the task for which they were created, we counted, of course, on the impagable photographic work of Arturo Cerda and Rico, so that we can see in some of their photos also a certain evolution, is the case of the same spring in its natural state prior to its channelling, for not so long ago, until 1910, where today we see the seven years, there was only a plateau from which the crystal waters of the Sierra Cruzada were kept.