There's a place in El Entrego, a short walk from our places to stay in the Nalón Valley, where something happened that didn't happen anywhere else in Asturias: a mine run by the miners themselves. It's the Pozo San Vicente, whose headframe, almost 17 metres tall, still stands like an inland lighthouse. Between 1926 and 1970, under the management of the SOMA miners' union, the men who went down this pit earned two pesetas more than everywhere else in Asturias and worked an hour less. This is the story of that magnificent oddity.
From an 1883 mining concession to a vertical pit
The story begins in 1883, with the founding of the Coto San Vicente, a group of eight mining concessions on the hillside above El Entrego. For decades it was worked like so many other mines in the valley, until in 1916 the company Carbones de San Vicente took over and decided to modernise: between 1918 and 1919 the vertical pit was put in, with its 16.80-metre tower-type headframe, the metal structure that carried the cage up and down.
That's the headframe still standing today, more than a century later. In a valley where so many installations disappeared, seeing it outlined against the green is to understand at a glance what this place was: not a postcard mining landscape, but a workplace where whole generations earned a living in the dark.
1926: the union takes over
What makes Pozo San Vicente a unique case came in 1926, when SOMA — the Asturian miners' union — took control of the operation. It was the only case of mining self-management of this kind: the workers running their own mine. The conditions reflected it: two pesetas more in wages than the rest of Asturias's mines, and an hour less on the shift.
Two pesetas and an hour might look like small change today. In the Asturias of the 1920s, they were a statement of principle: practical proof that a mine could be run with more dignity. That worker management lasted until 1970, when the pit passed to HUNOSA, the state company that brought together Asturian mining. Final closure came in 1998, with the decline of coal.
Visiting it today: memory at the foot of the headframe
Pozo San Vicente stands metres from the MUMI, the Mining Museum, in the hamlet of San Vicente de El Entrego, and guided visits are arranged through the museum. Don't expect grand effects: what's here is the original structure, documentation of the mining and labour history, and the silence of a place that worked for a hundred-odd years. Sometimes that says more than any audiovisual display.
You're free to photograph it, and the location makes it easy: the MUMI, the Pozo Sotón and, a bit further off, the Ecomuseo del Valle de Samuño all sit in the same area. It's probably the highest concentration of visitable mining heritage in Asturias, and it's literally in the neighbourhood of our places to stay in the valley.
Why this story is ours
Anyone staying with us in the Nalón Valley sleeps in villages that exist because of the mine: Sotrondio, El Entrego, Blimea. Pozo San Vicente isn't just another attraction; it's the biography of the place. And its chapter of self-management — that mine where the miners decided pay could be better and hours shorter — is one of those local stories that deserves telling beyond the valley.
Cadaqués has its light and Barcelona its thousand plans, but this exists only here: a headframe from 1919, still standing, and behind it, the memory of the only mine in Asturias that belonged to the people who went down into it.