Comments on: Snow Wells

By: Caesar

Caesar — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:14:35 +0000

Hi Sharon,
There is a book about the pozos. It’s in Spanish. It’s called Los pozos de nieve de Sierra Espuña: (el comercio de la nieve en el Reino de Murcia, siglos XVI-XX), by Ginés Rosa, ISBN 9788460744818. I don’t know where you can buy it… There is some info about the book at http://www.totana.com/cgi-bin/pozos.asp.
There is a certain amount of information online too – search for “Pozos de Nieve Sierra Espuna”.
I hope this is helpful.

By: sharon

sharon — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:25:46 +0000

hie
that is a very interesting piece you have written there. do you know if there is a booklet or website where i can find the trail of the 26 pozos. also any other info on pozos and there whereabouts, any region?
thank you
sharon

By: Jill Dickin Schinas

Jill Dickin Schinas — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:41:59 +0000

Thanks for the link. As you say, many grand estates in England had ice houses and some even had special ponds, created for the harvesting of the ice. The distinctive thing about the Spanish snow wells is that they are very much bigger. They are also very remote from the towns whose inhabitants they served. For me, however, the most intriguing thing is the idea of anyone managing to make and preserve ice in a country which has such a hot summer.

I have been doing a little bit more reading on this fascinating subject, and I have now discovered that there was also an ice-making industry in New England, one of the most northerly states in the USA. Besides making ice for local consumption, the manufacturers also shipped it to the southern states and to the Caribbean!

Of course, the ice-making business in the USA was nowhere near so old as the one in Spain – and, as it turns out, even these “pozos” are relatively modern. I have now learnt that man was harvesting ice and preserving it in Iraq, of all places, in 1700 BC! Presumably these snow houses must have been run along the same lines as the Spanish ones, with the ice being made up in the mountains and carried down as and when the king wanted to hold a party…

It is said that Alexander the Great also had ice houses built, and there were ice houses in Rome during the third century AD. There’s really nothing new under the sun!

By: G'pa

G'pa — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:18:45 +0000

They're not on the same scale, but many estates had ice houses in the past. The nearest I know of is at Bognor. The BR history page has this, with a digram showing a cross section. [Note : Long excerpt from Bognor Local History website removed for copyright reasons. The original article can be found at http://www.bognor-local-history.co.uk/article36.html. --Caesar]