When we think of traditional mills, a lot of people think as the first image the one of a windmill, like the ones of La Mancha or Don Quixote. But the truth is that in our rural world they are not easy to find. Mills have been the pre-industrial installations of greater potency and complexity, at least until the 18th century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The reason is that traditional Valencian mills have been powered by water, not by wind.
There have been mills of diverse kinds. Historically, mills have been named to the machines which used to grind grain and making flour, as well as the buildings that housed the machines, even the word mill has been designated to the stone or stones that were used to grind those grains. Mills are devices that have existed for millennia because flour is part of the basic human nutrition, but logically, they have changed enough their structure and mechanism, as well as the source of energy that has powered them.
Thus, first mills from thousand years ago are so-called manual mills: a simple hard concave stone, inside which the grains were crushed manually with another stone. During the Roman age, they already built mills that were bigger and with a greater capacity, powered by draft animals or by slaves. Other mills began to build, the first ones powered by water as their energy source to rotate a wheel and move the grinding wheel that crushed the grains to make flour.
These hydraulic mills are the most used at the Muslim Valencia of the 8th and 13th centuries, linked to its location about the ditches and irrigation channels of the first crops. And those are the ones that keep making it work and making new ones from that century with the conquer and distribution of James I and until the end of the 19th century, generating the so usual image of a Valencian mill as an alquería located on a ditch. Only from the end of 1800, other energy sources such as steam and then electricity began to be used, being in the 20th century some of them actual modern flour factories.
Their predominant usages have been to make flour of diverse cereals to make then bread, but also from centuries ago, traditional mills were used to other activities. From the Middle Ages, in l’Horta of Valencia, there also existed rice mills to remove the rice husks; draper or fulling mills to prepare cloth and rags; iron mills or hammers for making metal; powder mills, varnishes, sawing wood or marble, to make studs, and until the beginning of the 20th century some were converted into small hydroelectric plants.
In l’Horta of Valencia there were about two hundred hydraulic mills at the time of their peak, around the year 1900, although today a large part of them have disappeared altogether due to the loss of functions and efficiency compared to the factory competition. That is why the interest of the inventory, knowledge and evaluation of those that have reached us, whether they are just ruins, whether they maintain the building or the few that still have their machinery inside. Nor do they all have the same patrimonial value today; a few preserve very old parts of the building, even from the 15th century, but in general it is more usual that they were largely buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries. In any case, its physical location and the relationship with the canals is usually older, in part of the medieval cases. They are not usually protected by the Administration, although in recent years it has been usual that from the studies that have been done on hydraulic heritage of l’Horta of Valencia, quite a few of those that are left have been included in the local inventories of heritage.
