Prints of Córdoba: The Palace of the Volt

This picturesque name is as it was known the power plant in the municipality of The Carpio, considered one of the most significant examples of industrial architecture Andalusian early twentieth century. The plant is part of a larger project that consists of a dam and a communication channel between the two, called the whole “El Salto“. The subsequent history of the project and construction is, in summary, next:

In 1898 two young engineers, Saez Carlos Mendoza and Alfredo Moreno Osorio Argandoña, installed an engineering office in Madrid, in the family home of the first. As a first option offered their civil engineering services to those municipalities that by the modesty of their budgets could not maintain a permanent service. Actually, what starts is kind of a technical office that since the beginning, with the addition of another engineer Antonio González Echarte, be oriented towards the various facets of the production, transport and distribution of electric energy. As telegraphic address adopting the name of Men-ge-mor, acronym formed from the first syllables of the names of its founders: Mendoza, Echarte and Moreno González.

With a very favorable location, in a bend of the river about five miles, “El Salto” El Carpio was a work performed by administration by the Company under the direction of his Don Carlos Mendoza, with engineer Don Antonio del Aguila as director of works and the collaboration of architect Don Casto Fernández-Shaw, they got to the set, dam and power, one admirable work for various reasons,, including the successful integration of the buildings into the landscape. The jump from El Carpio favored in transit Mengemor preferably about customers to other urban miners, to join their market supply of the city of Córdoba.

Power Plant is a building with an aesthetic concern, de planta rectangular y diseño de inspiración neomudéjar, especially in the vaults of the covered, hits, windows and railings. The cover has two threads domed turrets brick of a singular air historicist and expressionist, plus some details among which a balcony overlooking the Guadalquivir supported by a head elephant as a brace, Granada sculptor Juan Cristobal, with which it is intended to symbolize the 10.500 horse power plant. The factory is treated as an ashlar blocks and importantly, the design of foreign-made turbines, in use since its installation.

The dam is situated at Km. 3 the road from Pedro Abad-Adamuz (CO-3107), in the Guadalquivir River. Located in a place where there were some old watermills, has two brackets on both sides of the river bed level the five interior buttresses that support the double doors and the bridge deck, up on it to support the metal structure where the machines are supported actuate the double doors. At the end of the right bank, a stirrup arch stands on the road in the form of door. Here live the stairs to the control room, completed by one octagonal turret, which had a dome. This dome, the horseshoe arch with drip cap, groups of single or double windows and railings brackets are the Mudejar style driveway.

His artistic values ​​earned it in 1925 Gold Medal of the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris and later the dam "El Salto" was declared a Cultural (BIC), with the Monument category, by the Governing Council of the Andalusian Year 2003.

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