The discovery of the site
The site of La Pedrera receives its name from the lithographic stone extraction activity that took place at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. In fact, the geological and/or palaeontological name of the site is “Lithographic limestone with plants and vertebrates from La Pedrera de Rúbies”. It is located in the Montsec de Meià mountain range, on the so-called hill of Cabrera, near the abandoned village of Rúbies (municipality of Camarasa) and Santa Maria de Meià (municipality of Vilanova de Meià).
This site was discovered by the mining engineer Lluís Marià Vidal i Carreres, who had studied the Montsec mountain range in 1875 and who knew in great detail the various rocks, layers and geological formations of the same. It began to be exploited commercially in the first months of 1898.
The oldest document that speaks of the Pedrera de Meià informs us that it was ceded to Josep Palmada i Guitart, by means of a public auction held in the Town Hall of Santa Maria de Meià (then a town of 474 inhabitants and head of its municipality), on December 15, 1897. They made the notarial deed on January 18, 1898. The emphyteutical census was granted for fifty years and the City Council reserved direct ownership of the estate. The auction was open to everyone and to the highest bidder. Palmada offered at auction 1,525 pesetas for the quarry and 183 pesetas for the annual census of emphyteusis.
The auction session was not peaceful, since among those present there were higher economic offers than those made by Palmada, but they had been rejected for not meeting the conditions of the auction. Specifically, Bonaventura Salud, on behalf of the landowner of Vilanova de Meià, Emili Castejón Mestres, offered a higher price for the emphyteutical census, but it did not meet the requirements and was rejected. Despite the protests, the mayor of Santa Maria de Meià, Pere Rocaspana i Farriol, awarded the quarry to Josep Palmada. The area granted was forty thousand square meters of land and he was obliged by the conditions of the auction to open or arrange a path from the quarry to Vilanova de Meià, passing through Santa Maria. Palmada took personal possession at the foot of the quarry estate in front of the mayor and other witnesses on January 19, 1898.
The Paso de la Cabroa
To get the company up and running, they opened a cart path that went down from near Rúbies to the quarry, designing a zigzag layout with very angular twists and turns until they reached the site. From Rúbies, the path descends towards Santa Maria through the dangerous area of La Cabroa. The works on this track were directed by Miquel Escolà, known as “Miquel de la Pedrera”. As the place where the stone was extracted was very far from the nearest villages, six huts were built at the foot of the quarry where the workers stayed.
Start and end of the work
The site began to be commercially exploited in the first months of 1898.
The quarried slabs were transported by carts that went down the Cabroa and could not be loaded much because the road was narrow, steep and very dangerous. These carts, even beyond the Cabroa , were pulled by oxen, since their power and slower movement minimized the danger. When they reached the best path, the bulls were exchanged for machetes that lowered the carts to Santa Maria de Meià. From here, the slabs were also lowered in carts to the Tàrrega railway station, located 44 km away. From there, the lithographic stones were transported to Barcelona to a warehouse on Carrer Aribau where they were deposited, to be distributed to the different printing presses.
On 2 July 1903, the public limited company Calizas Litográficas S.A. was incorporated with registered office in Barcelona and a share capital of 1,500,000 pesetas, divided into three thousand shares of 500 pesetas each. The president of the company was Lluís Marià Vidal and the managing director was Josep Palmada, a building contractor from Barcelona who was already directing the extraction work. These lithographic slabs had to compete with those imported from the well-known sites of Snolhofen (Bavaria, Germany) and Cerin (Ain, France).
According to some sources, the commercial extraction of lithographic slabs ended in 1913 (Vidal 1915, p. 23). In a lecture that Vidal himself gave in 1917 on the geology of Montsec at the Royal Academy of Sciences of Barcelona, he exposes the error of the Montsec lithographic limestone business, for having set up slab treatment workshops in Barcelona, instead of having done so at the foot of the same quarry. as was done in Solnhofen, which significantly increased costs. Despite this, Vidal still considered the business profitable not only because of the lithographic slabs, but also as a building material and for the paleontological treasures found there. Once the commercial exploitation of the site was finished, the great fossil finds were also finished and the Pedrera de Meià was largely forgotten.
After the death of Lluís Marià Vidal in 1922 and the impasse of the Civil War, La Pedrera fell into widespread oblivion. During 1938, in the midst of the Civil War and when the national front reached the Noguera Pallaresa, La Pedrera was part of the bridgehead of the insurrectionary army of the Barony of Sant Oïsme. After the war, when the country began to wake up from the darkness generated by the Franco regime, professionals and amateurs rediscovered La Pedrera de Meià again.
Currently La Pedrera is located within the municipality of Vilanova de Meià and has historically been referred to as Pedrera de Santa Maria de Meyà and also as Santa Maria de Meià.
As for this easternmost part of Montsec , it has also received both the name of Montsec de Rúbies and Montsec de Meià, the most accepted today and the one we will use as a toponym to designate both this eastern part of Montsec and to designate La Pedrera.