de Marbella.
19th century
In the early nineteenth century the blast furnaces of Marbella were constructed after the discovery of an iron ore deposit in nearby Ojen, due to the availability of charcoal made from the trees of the Sierra Blanca and water from the Verde River, as a ready supply of both these was needed for the manufacture of steel. They were the first civilian iron-smelting operations in Spain, and ultimately produced up to 75% of the country's cast iron. In 1860 the Marqués del Duero founded an agricultural colony, now the heart of San Pedro Alcántara. The dismantling of the steel industry based in the forges of El Angel and La Concepción occurred simultaneously, disrupting the local economy, as much of the population had to return to farming or fishing for a livelihood. This situation was compounded by the widespread crisis of traditional agriculture, and by the epidemic of phylloxera blight in the vineyards, all of which accounted for Marbella's high unemployment, increase in poverty, and the starvation of many day laborers.
The associated infrastructure built for the installation of the foundry of El Angel in 1871 by the British-owned Marbella Iron Ore Company temporarily relieved the situation, and even turned the city into a magnet for immigration, increasing its population. However, the company did not survive the worldwide economic crisis of 1893, and closed its doors in that year due to the difficulty of finding a market for the magnetite iron ore removed from its mine.
In the late nineteenth century, Marbella was a village composed of three parts: the main districts, the Barrio Alto or San Francisco, and the Barrio Nueveo, and three smaller nuclei arranged around the old ironworks and the farm-model of the colony of San Pedro Alcántara, also isolated dwellings in orchards and farms. The general population was divided between a small group of oligarchs and the working
