Área Recreativa Los Tornos is at the western end of the Ojen Valley near Facinas. Unless your visit coincides with a major festival day or a weekend (when it can be packed), it's a tranquil sort of place. It's shady yet lightly enough wooded to allow you to watch passing raptors.
When the small bar is open it also makes a good refreshment stop for thirsty/hungry birders.
Most of the Área Recreativa is dotted by mature cork oaks which attract migrants like Spotted and Pied Flycatchers, Redstarts and an assortment of warblers. The openness of the habitat also makes it easier to spot not only feeding passerines but also passing raptors which, given its location, can pass over in droves.
The Rio Almodóvar forms the northern and eastern edge of the Área Recreativa and the Arroyo de Cuna it's western limits. By summer the Rio Almodóvar is more a string of disconnected puddles than a river but nonetheless it supports a ribbon of riverine woodland. Look here for Cetti's Warbler and Iberian Chiffchaff. It may also be worth checking here for Scops Owl, a very scarce bird in Cadiz province. I've not found one here but have heard them less than 2 km along the river in the same habitat (on private land).
History - ancient, medieaval and modern - is never far away in Spain and Área Recreativa Los Tornos is no exception. Turnos can be translated as "lathes" but also means "work shift" which presumably hints at the site's dark and distinctly untranquil past.
A faded and rusting sign by the entrance tells the story:
In the area of Los Tornos, the Disciplinary Battalion of Working Soldiers No. 1 was located and Battalion 46 was also located by the Venta de Ojén (halfway along the Ojen valley and still in use well into the 2000s). The camp was there during the months of August, September and October of 1941. Its Republican prisoners built this section of road during these months.
The prisoners were mustered in battalions of about 700 to 1,000 prisoners. Each battalion in turn was divided into four companies of about 200 prisoners and each company, due to the needs of the works they were carrying out, could be separated into detachments of indeterminate number, or joined with other battalions or companies.
In the case of the Disciplinary Battalion of Working Soldiers number 46, after ending up in Los Tornos they went to the Tarifa area from November to carry out the toughest jobs in the installation of the El Vigia Coastal Battery
The living conditions that these men endured were extreme and were aggravated, in the postwar context, by being the losers of the war. Hard work, lack of hygiene, hunger, cold and diseases such as exanthematic typhus or diarrhoea, ended the lives of many of them.
It's a measure of the brutality with which prisoners were treated that even Mussolini's foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, was shocked by what he witnessed saying "They are not prisoners of war, they are slaves of war".
According to one historian, 90,000 Republican prisoners were sent off to 121 labour battalions and 8,000 to military workshops. Thousands of prisoners were forced to work building dams, highways, etc in a system persisted into the 1960s. Exactly how many died due to the brutality with which they were treated, the poor food they were given and the unsanitary conditions in which they were kept is difficult to establish but certainly runs into many tens of thousands.
It is something to ponder when you drive or walk along many of the tracks and minor roads in the area and elsewhere in Spain many of which were constructed using such slave labour.
A faded and rusting sign by the entrance tells the story:
In the area of Los Tornos, the Disciplinary Battalion of Working Soldiers No. 1 was located and Battalion 46 was also located by the Venta de Ojén (halfway along the Ojen valley and still in use well into the 2000s). The camp was there during the months of August, September and October of 1941. Its Republican prisoners built this section of road during these months.
The prisoners were mustered in battalions of about 700 to 1,000 prisoners. Each battalion in turn was divided into four companies of about 200 prisoners and each company, due to the needs of the works they were carrying out, could be separated into detachments of indeterminate number, or joined with other battalions or companies.
In the case of the Disciplinary Battalion of Working Soldiers number 46, after ending up in Los Tornos they went to the Tarifa area from November to carry out the toughest jobs in the installation of the El Vigia Coastal Battery
The living conditions that these men endured were extreme and were aggravated, in the postwar context, by being the losers of the war. Hard work, lack of hygiene, hunger, cold and diseases such as exanthematic typhus or diarrhoea, ended the lives of many of them.
It's a measure of the brutality with which prisoners were treated that even Mussolini's foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, was shocked by what he witnessed saying "They are not prisoners of war, they are slaves of war".
According to one historian, 90,000 Republican prisoners were sent off to 121 labour battalions and 8,000 to military workshops. Thousands of prisoners were forced to work building dams, highways, etc in a system persisted into the 1960s. Exactly how many died due to the brutality with which they were treated, the poor food they were given and the unsanitary conditions in which they were kept is difficult to establish but certainly runs into many tens of thousands.
It is something to ponder when you drive or walk along many of the tracks and minor roads in the area and elsewhere in Spain many of which were constructed using such slave labour.
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