AUTRAN WATERWHEEL
La Noria de Autrán is located on the El Almendral estate, to the northwest of the town of Puerto Real, in the area known as Cerro de Autrán.
It is a waterwheel that was part of an agricultural exploitation implanted in the middle of the 18th century by the French engineer and shipbuilder Ciprián Autrán, director of the Arsenal of the Carraca, exploitation that would be composed at least by a farmhouse, an oil complex and the waterwheel.
The waterwheel, which still preserves its well and the start of the aqueduct that would carry water to the oil mill, the crops and the house, is an excellent example of a blood waterwheel, with few parallels in our territory.
Its structure is composed of a main vessel and 14 buttresses raised for its support. As for its dimensions, it has a diameter of 11 meters with a height of between 3 and 5.50 meters.
The farmhouse of Autrán was occupied between 1810 and 1812 by the Napoleonic troops that settled in Puerto Real, fortifying both the farmhouse and the waterwheel itself, playing an important military role as a point of control of the territory by the French army.
The farmhouse would be destroyed between the end of 1812 and the beginning of 1813 to avoid further military occupations, a task from which the waterwheel was spared. Both the farmhouse, of which some structures remain, and the waterwheel itself were built in the eighteenth century on an ancient Roman settlement related to the production of amphorae, a site that spans a chronology from the first century BC to the second century AD.
