It was once referred to as ‘Spain’s heater.’ Despite its small size, the far-flung town of Fabero, located in the mountainous region of Bierzo in the province of León, used to heat stoves in Barcelona and power factories and trains in Madrid. The town’s inhabitants have always boasted that they were the driving force behind the growth of Spain’s industry and large cities. None of that progress would have been possible without anthracite, a very primitive type of mineral coal with a shiny black hue that accumulated in the bowels of the earth in the region for millions of years.

Now a quiet town, Fabero was once a teeming hub of activity. Since the discovery of the first coal seams there in 1843, its foundations have been filled with shafts and galleries bustling with as much life as the town above ground. If 8,000 people lived in the town, close to 4,000 were moving below it. In coal’s heyday, the 1960s, the mining companies needed much more labour than the region could provide and recruited miners from other regions and even other countries like Portugal and Cape Verde.

In those days, the bars were open 24 hours a day, the schools were full of children who graduated and went straight to the mines, seduced by an employment opportunity that at the time, long before the world understood the dramatic effects of CO2 emissions, seemed eternal.

But times are different now. With the future of our planet in jeopardy, Fabero has become one of the laboratories where Spain is trying to prove that transition from fossil fuels to clean energy is possible.

Since taking office in June 2018, the socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, as set out in the newly proposed Climate Change Law. This means that by that date, Spain will only be able to emit as much CO2 as its carbon sinks are capable of absorbing.

Almost all of Spain’s remaining coal mines, concentrated in the four provinces of Asturias, Palencia, Teruel and León, closed in December 2018. They were followed in July 2020 by the thermal power stations that until then had been burning coal. Both closures, the result of a historic agreement between the government, employers and trade unions, will mean the disappearance of about 6,700 direct jobs between miners and employees of thermal power stations. This represents a true disaster for towns like Fabero, where coal has been the sole way of life for 175 years and people have no other way to make a living. To address this situation, Spain became the first country in the world to develop a Just Transition Strategy, designed to do the just thing of preventing these territories from emptying out, ageing and dying off like the coal industry.

“For a transition to be just it must include measures for protecting workers, it must have stable planning and laws, propose alternatives and training, and provide hope and certainty,” explains Mariano Sanz, secretary of the environment at Workers’ Commissions (CCOO), one of the trade unions that has signed the agreement, along with UGT-FICA and USO.

With a time frame of 2019 to 2027, the strategy provides for early retirement and incentive leave for coal workers who find it more difficult to re-enter the labour market, and commits to relocating the remaining workers, including subcontracted workers, to work in the environmental restoration of mines or the dismantling of thermal plants.

It also proposes the comprehensive transformation of mining regions, including attracting new employment niches such as renewable energies, agro-industry and tourism in order to secure the present and above all the future of these areas.

“The number of workers who need to be relocated isn’t so high, the problem is new jobs, the next generation, young people,” says Víctor Fernández, mining secretary at UGT-FICA. “The workers will ultimately find new employment, but they have children. Where will they go if there’s no good conversion?”

Breaking from dependency on coal will be a complex process that will take time, but in towns like Fabero, where the mines have long been closed and life – both above ground and below – is no longer the same, the clock is ticking. The choice used to be coal or nothing. Now there’s not even coal.

The end and the resistance

Every time a siren sounded in the streets of Fabero it meant one of two things: it was time to enter the mine or time to leave it. If the siren sounded at a different hour, in the middle of the morning or afternoon for example, it meant only one thing: there had been a tragedy, an accident, probably fatal. “Now when people hear it they’re happy because they know that tourists have come,” says Chencho Martínez. He is one of the tour guides at Pozo Julia, Fabero’s first mining installation to be converted into a museum.

The mine’s old headframe rises up from the wide dirt esplanade like a long iron limb, a lift connecting the surface with the vertical shaft by means of a system of pulleys. Both the miners and the anthracite, at least 100,000 tonnes a year, entered and exited the mine through this 275-metre deep passage.

Next to the headframe are the changing rooms, offices and machinery rooms, buildings that have remained the same since the shaft opened in 1947. Everything here is original, even the uniforms and boots, left behind by the last miners when the shaft closed in 1991 and today photographed by visitors. This authenticity has earned Fabero a place on the European Route of Industrial Heritage.

In 2020, Pozo Julia, along with other areas linked to the town’s mining history – Pozo Viejo, Mina Alicia, the Diego Pérez neighbourhood – became Bienes de Interés Cultural (BIC), protected sites of cultural interest. In 2019, 5,000 tourists visited Fabero, attracted by the old charm of its mines.

“Anthracite is the coal that burns the best and has the least impurities,” Chencho explains during the visit. “The layers are so compressed that they measure 30 centimetres to a metre,” he adds. This is significant, as it meant that the miners could not stand up straight and instead had to mine lying down for six or seven hours in 35-degree heat, their uniforms drenched from the humidity. Today, visitors are unable to go underground to visit these incredibly narrow cavities, but the Cuenca de Fabero Miners’ Association has reconstructed an exact duplicate on the surface. The experience is so realistic that visitors often think they are in the actual shaft.

“It was a selfless effort by all of the workers, we did it to make sure that our culture and way of life as miners would not be forgotten,” explains Paúl Martínez, one of the last miners to take early retirement at the end of 2018.

He and his companions did all of the work themselves, only receiving financial support from the municipal council with the hope of receiving additional funds later on. At that time, in 2010, the government promised them a subsidy of €8 million to turn Pozo Julia into a brand-new mining theme park, but the money never materialised. Since then, the town has been suspicious of the ‘just’ nature of this transition.

Mining reconversion is nothing new for this area. Spain has been talking about it since the 1990s, initially more for economic reasons than for environmental ones.

A drop in the price of coal and an increase in foreign mineral imports led to the first closures and redundancies. The country went from employing 100,000 miners in 1960 to around 45,000.

It was then that the government began to promote a series of ‘coal plans,’ subsidies aimed at creating alternative employment and stemming the outflow of young people already taking place. Part of the money, as was the case with the Fabero theme park, was never invested – some mining basins are owed more than €500 million – or was spent on projects that had nothing to do with job creation, such as water treatment plants and sport centres. According to a report by the Court of Auditors of Aragon covering the period between 2006 and 2017, many of these funds were managed inefficiently. There was no strategic plan or subsequent monitoring. Projects that were already funded never got off the ground and thus failed to prevent miners’ children from leaving. Villages like Villablino, also in León, lost as many as half of its residents.

“We had almost 17,000 registered inhabitants and now it’s down to less than 9,000. The early retirees have left, many decided to look for an alternative elsewhere because they don’t see a future for their children here,” says Mario Rivas, the town’s mayor and president of the Association of Mining Regions (ACOM). The outlook was already bleak when 2010 arrived and the European Union set a date for the end of coal. The mines still receiving subsidies were set to close in 2018. But they didn’t go quietly, and many resisted until the very end.

“Mining is more than a profession, it’s a way of life. We have always fought to make sure that it would be part of our future until one day we woke up and the closures were here. We weren’t prepared for that end,” admits Rivas. Over the following years, the mining basins organised protests, blocked roads and staged ‘Black Marches’ in 2010 and again in 2012, when miners marched all the way to Madrid. 2018 was still a long way off.

“One of the most serious problems has been the lack of acceptance. I think there was a lack of clarity and honesty on the part of the administrations and unions in saying this was over. It undermined understanding and the search for alternatives,” says Tatiana Nuño, head of energy and climate change at Greenpeace Spain.

“It wasn’t until 2018, when the government changed, that steps were taken in the right direction and it became clear that mining would shut down, that we were not going to prolong the agony. That was a turning point in acceptance of the situation.”

A slow transition

Stacks of papers accumulate on the desk in Mari Paz Martínez’s office. All of them are proposals, projects, hopes for Fabero’s future. “We are trying to open doors that we didn’t need before,” says the mayor.

One of those is tourism. Her intention is to continue the commitment to Pozo Julia while restoring other mining facilities such as Pozo Viejo and Gran Corta, a huge open cast mine that occupies a quarter of Fabero and whose 750 hectares today remain covered in debris. The municipal council wants to turn it into a geological adventure park with a large zip line and a fossil trail. They say that it could employ about 20 people, nothing like the 500 who once worked there, but something is better than nothing. “These days we’re happy to create five or ten jobs,” explains Martínez.

The Just Transition Strategy has several avenues for reviving mining territories. There is a €250 million fund spread over five years to support business initiatives, as well as aid for environmental restoration and the promotion of renewable energy projects. But the most ambitious are the so-called ‘transition agreements.’

These are medium- to long-term plans, 13 of which are now in progress, for choosing projects that will truly transform the economy of these towns. Through a process of open participation, town councils, autonomous communities, associations and trade unions propose different ideas. Those that create the most employment, those that are the most viable, as well as those that provide opportunities to women, historically displaced by mining, will be chosen. Funding will then be sought, including from the European Just Transition Fund, which will allocate 4 per cent of its budget to Spain.

“We’ve been surprised by the high level of participation and the number of projects that are being submitted to us,” says Laura Martín, director of the Just Transition Institute, the public entity responsible for receiving and evaluating proposals. “It’s an urgent matter in many regions because they are in danger of depopulation. In order to keep people there, we need to understand very well what their needs are.”

In the initial phase, 1,400 proposals were submitted with roughly 500 organisations providing input. “The process is very different from previous plans. There’s more control and co-responsibility. We begin by talking about projects, not money. The unions are very involved,” says Mariano Sanz of CCOO.

Trade unions are calling for large energy companies to get involved in the same way. “Companies that have profited from coal for many years cannot simply abandon these regions, they have a responsibility. They should at least be responsible for implementing renewable energy there,” says Santiago González, head of USO’s international department. Precedents for this exist.

While it’s true that renewables constitute a cornerstone of reconversion, anyone who thinks that another large company will be able to single-handedly save all the jobs lost in the coal towns is mistaken. As Cristina Monge, a political scientist and executive advisor to the Ecology and Development Foundation (Ecodes) explains: “If we close down coal and get a big renewable company to come along, we will have gained in employment and sustainability but we will not have gained in resilience. The dependence is the same.” Large companies are important, she adds, “but it is more important to create an economic fabric of small and medium-sized companies.”

In this regard, the ‘transition agreements’ are oriented towards creating a diverse array of projects, whether in tourism, livestock farming, the digital economy or care for the elderly. The biggest setback so far has been time: everything is moving slower than expected. The most urgent matter, the environmental restoration of the mines and debris sites, has yet to be set in motion.

“We’re concerned,” says Mario Rivas, Mayor of Villablino. “We should be moving faster. Our community needs to see that this works to believe it.” This view is common in all of the mining communities, who saw their way of life come to an abrupt end but have yet to see a ‘transition’ take place. “This time the process is going better, in previous years they didn’t even listen to us. But this is much more urgent for us mayors than it is for the government. Our citizens are making demands of us, we’re under a lot of pressure,” says Mari Paz Martínez.

“We have a time problem. But it’s also true that when we arrived in June 2018, nothing had been done to prepare for the work. We had a hard time talking about the future, we spent the first six months only talking about whether or not the mines should be closed,” explains Martín of the Just Transition Institute. That delayed the start of the strategy and that was before the arrival of Covid-19 brought additional paralysis.

“The administration cannot do things overnight. We need checks in place to ensure that everything is done well. We are trying to be responsible so as not to make the mistakes of the past,” she says. “We know that we are not going to get back all the jobs that were here in 1980, that population has already been lost. The objective is not to lose the ones that were here in 2018 and in most of the areas we will be able to do this. I think that from now on we are going to be more agile. Now we are all talking about the future.”

Recovering hope

Their names are Juan, José Luis, José and Paúl. The oldest is 61, the youngest 47. All of them have spent almost as much time underground as they have in their own homes. They know what anthracite smells like, what the mountain sounds like when it cracks, what it feels like to fit your body into no more than forty centimetres for hours. “If the sun shone inside the mine no one would dare to work there because they’d see all the rocks hanging over their heads,” says Juan Alegria, a veteran miner – “an endangered species,” as he puts it.

Pozo Julia is a way for these men to keep their history alive. That’s why, in addition to building the gallery for tourists, they also work as volunteer guides. Telling their stories and their struggles is their way of reclaiming what they’ve lost.

“The country is historically indebted to us. The big cities of today are what they are because of the coal that used to come out of here,” says Paúl Martínez. “All that we are asking is that they don’t let us die.”

As they speak, their frustration is palpable. Hopelessness eats away at their spirits, the transition has left them tired and without faith. Who is going to come now, they wonder, what companies will be willing to move their offices to this place in the middle of the mountains? They used to come because there was coal by the tonne, but without the coal, what else can we offer?

“Our basins are not like those of the Ruhr,” says Mari Paz Martínez. The German mining basins, where universities and business incubators have been set up, don’t have the same problems that plague places like Fabero: small, poorly connected towns, often times without a good internet connection.

“We are where we are, so we understand that not just any company can come. We’ve asked for fibre optics to be installed and we are offering spaces to technology companies that want to develop here,” explains the mayor. “The problem is that we don’t know any companies, we need the government to support us in attracting industries.”

Another possibility is for the inhabitants of these regions to promote future projects themselves. But while it may seem obvious, this does not come easily in areas where inhabitants have been working for others for over 100 years. Changing this mentality, instilling entrepreneurial spirit in them, is no easy task. “Entrepreneurship is a cultural phenomenon and people in these towns haven’t learned it because we had the mine,” says Juan José Villanueva, a young entrepreneur from the Laciana mining valley, 47 kilometres from Fabero. A few years ago, he decided to buy an old mine and convert it into a craft beer brewery. In January 2020, his brand Docesetenta was awarded as the best beer in Spain. Today he employs six people, combining the brewery with the tourist operation of the mine.

“The recognition is very encouraging, it helps us demonstrate to the people here that it’s possible, that our main strength is our heritage, the mine. Without all our history, we would just be another beer,” says Villanueva. The future of Spain’s mining basins is still unknown, but if just one person in a single small town is able to brew beer where coal was once mined, there is still reason to hope.