Cañada de Agra

Cañada de Agra did not grow organically. It was built from scratch in the early 1960s by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC), a body set up under the Franco dictatorship to convert large areas of dry farmland into irrigated agricultural land. The government had identified the Hellín irrigation canal zone as a priority area for this programme around 1956. The first step was transforming 1,755 hectares of dryland into irrigated fields by increasing the canal's flow by 1,000 litres per second and tapping underground water sources. Three new villages were planned to house around 200 families, and Cañada de Agra was built on land that had belonged to the Serena Guirado brothers. Fourteen landowners had their land expropriated; in return, they received a house, a plot, and financial compensation, on the same terms as incoming settlers.

Ninety-seven families displaced by the construction of the Cenajo and Camarillas reservoirs were also resettled here, each receiving a house and a five-hectare plot. Other settlers had to meet a set of formal requirements: at least two years of farming experience, age between 23 and 50, no hereditary or physical conditions preventing farm work, a basic school certificate, and a record of acceptable conduct. Many applicants came from neighbouring provinces.

Construction finished around 1968, and the first families moved in then. The early years were hard. Most of the land had previously grown esparto grass, and the rest was scrubland never before farmed. Some settlers gave up their plots because the land could not generate enough income to cover costs. To help those who stayed, the INC supplied a shared pool of six tractors, ten motor cultivators, twelve trailers, nine sprayers, three cars, and 38 motorcycles.

In 1972 the INC handed management to its successor body, IRYDA. That same year the then Minister of Agriculture, Tomás Allende y García Baxter, visited the village and met with the settlers' council. The colonists told him directly that their plots were too small to be economically viable.

The village's layout sets it apart from other colonisation towns of the same era. While most were built on a simple grid, architect José Luis Fernández del Amo designed Cañada de Agra to follow the contours of the hillside it sits on, with curved blocks of houses arranged irregularly among dense vegetation. This design was part of a wider body of colonisation work that won Fernández del Amo the Grand Prize for Architecture at the VI São Paulo Bienal in 1961, shared with Rafael Leoz.

At the centre of the village is a arcaded square, the main public space, presided over by the former administrative centre, now the municipal library. Facing it are three houses originally reserved for craftspeople and small traders. The square was renovated in 2005, when a tree trunk that had been used for the traditional greasy pole game during festivals was removed.

The parish church of San José is the architectural highlight. Fernández del Amo won the National Architecture Prize in 1967 for it. The building shows the influence of Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp in its floor plan, curved interior false ceiling, and the way the presbytery is lit from the side through stained glass. Antonio Hernández Carpe made the stained glass windows in the presbytery and nave, and also designed the tilework in the baptistery and porch. The ceramic altar tiles are by Arcadio Blasco. Outside the church stands a stone figure of San Isidro sculpted by Antonio Failde; inside, the wooden carving of San José and a bas-relief depicting the baptism came from the Talleres Granda workshops.

Elsewhere in the village, a more recently built park known as the Parque de la Fuente features paths through lawns leading to a stone fountain. The fountain has been out of service for years due to a lack of maintenance by the local council.