History
Mountain coal mining in the valley of the río Samuño, an affluent of the Nalón in the concejo of Langreo, dates from at least the 1840s, carried out through horizontal gallery workings at different levels on the hillsides. In the 1880s, the Sociedad Carbones Asturianos, founded in Bilbao in 1890, assumed control of the valley's coal concessions. This company was linked to Catalana de Gas y Electricidad, whose business depended on hard coal for the manufacture of gas for urban lighting and later electricity generation.
In 1907 the Basque businessman Horacio Echevarrieta acquired the Samuño concessions; these subsequently passed to Catalana de Gas y Electricidad in 1923, and the registered office of Carbones Asturianos was thereafter based in Barcelona. The coal was used for gas lighting in various cities, including Barcelona. In the early twentieth century, Carbones Asturianos reached annual production of around 168,000 tonnes from the mountain workings.
The Sama–Samuño branch of the Langreo railway enabled coal to be dispatched directly to the port of Gijón. The bocamina de Samuño dated from 1892 and the Socavón Emilia from 1904 — the latter belonging to the adjacent company Carbones de La Nueva but sharing the same valley. In 1925 shaft sinking at the Pozo Samuño vertical shaft commenced.
Works were disrupted by the Spanish Civil War, and the shaft only came into full service in the early 1940s. A machinery house was constructed during the sinking period, notable for its neo-regionalist architecture with broken gables and pronounced eaves combined with wide rationalist-influenced openings. The first extraction headframe, erected in 1943, was of riveted-iron profiles.
In the post-war period, a penal labour colony was established at the mine, housing approximately 180 prisoners who commuted part of their sentences through labour in the pit. The company's integration into HUNOSA took place in 1967. From the 1970s, HUNOSA concentrated all production from the valley of the Candín in the Pozo Samuño, with the neighbouring Pozo San Luis serving as its auxiliary.
The site was progressively developed: the taller eléctrico dates from 1945 (though possibly a renovation of an earlier building); the offices and compressor room are also of 1945, in a more rationalist style. The casa de aseo, built in 1970 (or noted as 1962 in one source), is the most architecturally distinguished building of the complex: it has a circular plan unique in Asturian industrial architecture, with a spiral staircase that also houses the heating system, and is generously lit by continuous fenestration around the entire façade. The original 1943 riveted-iron headframe was replaced in 1985 by a new steel extraction tower assembled on site, approximately 20 metres high, fitted with an Italian-made Koepe hoist machine controlled by an Ilgner unit.
This new tower's two pulleys are in the same plane, a characteristic that distinguishes it from most Asturian headframes. The embarque is sheltered by a protective canopy. Before closure, Samuño had a workforce of around a thousand.
Coal extraction definitively ceased in 2001. Following closure, the complex was left abandoned. It is included in the Inventario Cultural del Principado de Asturias and in the Catálogo de protección de Hunosa.
It forms part of the cultural landscape of the Ecomuseo Minero Valle de Samuño, and the tourist train that travels the valley enters the underground network through the Pozo Samuño, passing through the Socavón Emilia to reach the Pozo San Luis.