The English Cable: Alquife's odd ruin

The English Cable, also known as El Alquife Muelle, is a historic mineral cargo pier located in Almería, Spain. It was built between 1902 and 1904 by the company The Alquife Mines and Railway Company Limited. The Cable Inglés was constructed to transport mineral iron from the Alquife mines to the port of Almería more efficiently. It opened for public visits in April 2023. The pier's infrastructure, weighing 3824 tons, was made of steel from Scotland, with additional materials of local woods, concrete, and railway tracks.

It was created to simplify the packing of mineral iron, once a time-consuming process that took 8 to 10 days, down to just 10 hours. Despite initial opposition, the pier was eventually declared a cultural asset of interest in 1998 due to its Andalusian iron architecture and ethnographic importance. As the second-most visited cultural space in Almería, after the Alcazaba, the Cable Inglés now stands as an architectural curiosity.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons