History of the Rodes Hermanos SA foundry

The block formerly occupied by the Rodes foundry is made up of a group of buildings intended for both industrial and residential use.

It is important to highlight its ideal location in the Ensanche area of the town centre of Alcoy and in the vicinity of the main communication routes, both by road and rail.

History

The first buildings were designed and erected at the beginning of the 20th century and were the work of engineers and architects - most of them locals - such as Timoteo Briet Montaud, Vicente Pascual Pastor, José Cort Merita, Rafael Masanet Faus and Joaquín Aracil Aznar. Its predominant styles are Art Nouveau and eclectic, which we see above all in its façades, both in the factory buildings and those destined for housing.

The first building constructed for the Rodes Hermanos company was El Vulcano, the work of the engineer Cort Merita and the architect Pascual Pastor. It was in 1908 when the facilities for this large foundry were planned, together with other metallurgical industries and the carriage workshops of Antonio Botella y Cia. and José Reig Boronat.

It was in the first decades of the 20th century that the urban layout of the block was defined and delimited. In later years, a number of buildings were constructed, both on the outside and inside, for use as warehouses, boiler and shift workshops, garages and dwellings. These buildings underwent some remodelling due, above all, to the damage caused to the roofs by the heavy snowfalls of 1926 and 1927 and, above all, by the three bombings suffered by the Italian air force during the Civil War in the years 1938-1939, which led to the construction of an air raid shelter with a capacity for more than 200 people inside.

During the civil war, the company Rodes Hermanos was collectivised and became known as Industrias Metalúrgicas Alcoyanas Socializadas (IMAS). Production was devoted to producing material and armaments for the Republican army. Once the war was over, the companies returned to their previous owners, and Rodes Hermanos SA was dedicated to the production of machinery for the agricultural sector, such as presses and shifts for the production of wines and oils, as well as water conduction and channelling and the construction of machinery and spare parts for the footwear and textile industries.

Apart from the company Rodes Hermanos SA, which occupied most of the facilities, the Rodes block housed other industrial companies, both metallurgical and textile, such as the foundry of Antonio Botella y Cia., the carriage workshop of José Reig Boronat, the spinning mill of Francisco Silvestre, the jute fabric factory of Santiago Gisbert, the stuffed olive factory of Grau, Pascual y Gisbert and the bodywork workshop of La Moderna. The industrial activities and the use of its facilities ended definitively in the 1980s with the location of Jorge Valor Coloma's textile company on its premises.

A peculiarity of the block is the construction of dwellings interspersed between the manufacturing facilities, most of which were owned by the industrialists. Most of them were rented, which ensured an extra income in addition to their rents. Another peculiarity is that on the upper floor of the main entrances to the factories, living spaces were built, in the form of a porter's lodge, to control access to the facilities.