When the cars still did not exist, in a village in the middle of Andalusia, workers of the power plant lived immersed in their world.
El Corchado is a small, mostly vanished workers’ colony inside the municipality of Jimena de la Frontera, in the province of Cádiz, reached from the nearby hamlet of San Pablo de Buceite. Getting there is not straightforward — the dirt track that leads in is gated, though the gate is easy enough to climb, and locals are a more reliable guide than any map. The colony sits on the right bank of the Guadiaro River, inside the Los Alcornocales Natural Park, directly across the water from the hydroelectric plant it was built to serve — a plant that, unlike the houses around it, never stopped running.
Historical Context
A Colony Built for a Power Station
The El Corchado hydroelectric plant began construction in 1904 and entered service in the autumn of 1906, built by the company Hidroeléctrica del Guadiaro, which was controlled by the Marqués de Larios family. The station drew water from a dam and diversion channel on the Guadiaro, on the Málaga side of the river in the municipality of Gaucín, and fed it through pressure pipes to turbines generating an original output of around 3.5 megawatts — later expanded, with the addition of Swiss-built Pelton and Francis turbines, to roughly 12,500 kilowatts. In 1907, the plant passed to Sevillana de Electricidad, and it eventually came under Endesa, which marked the plant’s centenary in 2007; more than a century after it first went online, it remains, by most accounts, the oldest hydroelectric plant of its kind still operating in Spain.
The workers who kept it running lived on the opposite bank, in Cádiz province, in the settlement that grew up around the plant and took its name: El Corchado. A metal suspension bridge across the Guadiaro connected the two banks and, by extension, the workers’ homes to their jobs. The village had a school serving children not only from El Corchado itself but from the surrounding Corchado road and nearby farmsteads — local accounts put the number at between twenty and twenty-five children. There was no resident priest; religious services were provided by clergy who travelled from San Pablo de Buceite. Community life had its own fixed points, among them an annual festival on 16 July in honour of the Virgen del Carmen, held in the plaza in front of the power station itself; the image of the Virgin venerated on that occasion is now kept in the church at San Pablo de Buceite.
Decline and Abandonment
The colony’s end was a direct consequence of the plant’s modernisation rather than any crisis distinct to the village itself. As the station was automated and fitted with remote-control systems, the resident technical staff needed to keep it running around the clock, which became unnecessary, and the workforce was progressively withdrawn. Most sources place the resulting depopulation in the mid-1980s, somewhat earlier than the early-1990s date given by local memory and preserved here as it was recounted on site; by whichever date the last families actually left, the plant itself never went dark; only the village around it did.
Architecture and Space
What remains is modest by design: a small cluster of workers’ cottages rather than any grand industrial architecture, laid out along a road that splits the settlement into an upper and lower section. The suspension bridge linking the village to the power station across the Guadiaro remains one of the site’s more distinctive features, alongside the plant building itself, which continues in industrial use and is not part of the abandoned area. In 2007, a section of this stretch of river and its surrounding landscape was used as a filming location for Steven Soderbergh’s two-part biographical film about Ernesto Che Guevara, starring Benicio del Toro.
What We Found
Unfortunately, now not much is left from what was before, and right now the village is in the process of being restored. The only thing that remains is the beautiful landscape and the peaceful location of this place.
It is situated in the middle of the forest, close to a river, and it is a good place where you can find inspiration or also meditate.
The Road That Split the Village
It was a rainy day in February when I reached the abandoned village in the company of my host, Louie, and her two dogs. We arrived by car, and it took approximately fifteen minutes from the centre of San Pablo to get there.
Leaving aside the gate, we got inside from another — in my opinion, more difficult — entry. Following the dirt road, after a few minutes, we found the place. Here, the road also divided the village into two parts: the upper part and the lower part.
Inside the Last Open House
Few cottages — in fact, the village is really small — were already closed off by workers with grates, already empty, ready to be rebuilt soon. I was able to get inside just one house, and except for dust, a chimney and a bathtub, nothing was left. Hidden and a little apart from the rest of the village, there was a fenced area, built with stones, where pigs were once kept.
“The work of restoration of the church and the school is almost completed; soon there will be a tourist village,” Louie told me. Such a pity I wasn’t there before to see how it looked in its original form.
Current Status
At the time of writing, in 2026, El Corchado is well past the point of simple abandonment. Restoration work, largely funded through Andalusia’s rural employment programme (PFEA) and coordinated by the Jimena de la Frontera town council together with the Junta de Andalucía and the Provincial Council of Cádiz, has been ongoing since 2015, converting the former workers’ cottages, school and church into a rural tourism complex known as Fábricas de Luz, connected to San Pablo de Buceite by a signed ecotourism trail. According to reporting from a February 2025 official visit by regional tourism authorities, construction on the site was described as being in its final stages, with completion targeted for 2026 and a public opening scheduled for May of that year. Searches conducted for this article found no independent confirmation that the site had formally opened to the public as of this writing, though by the stated timeline, it should now be open or very close to it. The hydroelectric plant across the river continues in commercial operation, unaffected by any of this, exactly as it has since 1906.
Urbex location:
