The Royal Factory of Lestache
The big creator of Xuvia mills was a French entrepreneur called Juan Lestache Nugos who was born in Vienne in southeast France in 1742. He started working as a child in his father’s flour shop and factory and, at the age of 25, he first arrived in Ferrol on board a ship departing from Bordeaux with flour cargo.
He soon realised the great business opportunities that the city of Ferrol offered and decided to settle commercialising cereals and other food types. He also found love there and married María López Lamas, resident of Neda, with whom he had four sons and three daughters.
With the earnings of his business activity, Lestache went a step further. He bought a good deal of plots by the river G rande de Xuvia, in the Narón jurisdiction, and partnered with another Frenchman, Francisco Bucau, for building two flour mills in 1775. The Lestache-Bucau society functioned until 1786, when the businessman from Vienne acquired from Bucau his part of the mills for a sum of 300.000 reales, thus remaining as the sole proprietor.
When we talk about Xuvia mills, we always mention Juan Lestache Nugos, but there is another big figure that is usually left aside: his wife, María López Lamas, a woman genuinely ahead of her time.
Actually, we know little about the first part of her life, except that she was from Neda and that she married the French entrepreneur in 1776, with whom she had four sons and three daughters. Besides, they also included in the family another son that Lestache had in France with some María Vizosa before marrying his wife. The boy went by the name of Juan Lestache Vizosa; he was brought by his father to Ferrol, he grew up in the family unit and then worked as a miller at the Xuvia flour factory.
We know more about María after Lestache’s demise in 1802. At that moment, her and their children remained as the heirs to the industrial facilities.
Five years later, in 1807, María López got married again. This time, she married Antonio García, a right-hand man who had been appointed as the man in charge of the family businesses by Ignacio Acha, one of Lestache’s sons-in-law, who was married to his older daughter Manuela Lestache.
The scandal was set. Not only Antonio García was much younger than her –he was less than 30 years old– but he also was from a different social class since his father was a humble carpenter from A Coruña outskirts, who sacrificed himself for the sake of giving his son the chance to study so he could carve a future for himself.
María López, one of the wealthiest and most respected women in Galicia, tore apart all conventions of the time and got married against the will of her children, who deemed the marriage an insult. The union also meant humiliation for her daughters, who were married to lieutenant colonels from the army. Therefore, this was a groundbreaking behaviour for her time, the inception in Galicia of selfconfident women with a strong personality, such as Mrs Emilia Pardo Bázan.
Antonio Garcia’s acceptance within the family was never consolidated, and after Maria’s death in 1814, he was expelled from the mortuary and shortly thereafter denounced under the accusation of negligent management of the family business.
Juan Lestache arrived in Ferrol in 1767, a highly euphoric village. In fact, the city area thrived during the 18th century. Firstly, owing to the awarding of the capital status of Spain’s Northern Naval Department in 1726 and, after that, thanks to the establishment of the Royal Military Arsenal in the village of A Graña, which years later –in 1750– would be transferred to Ferrol’s banks looking for an emplacement with better conditions and construction capabilities.
The royal industries brought along an important population growth with military men, engineers and plenty of workers and craftsmen who lived in the new residential neighbourhoods such as a Magdalena, with an orthogonal layout following the Enlightenment canons, or Esteiro, considered the first working-class neighbourhood in Galicia.
Drawn by the prospects of an expanding village, numerous businessmen and merchants came to Ferrol from Spain, France, Italy, Britain and the Netherlands. Some of them, such as Lestache, decided to settle in Ferrol and the surrounding villages.
In 1775, more than 30,000 people lived in Ferrol, being the most populated city in Galicia. Given the need to feed the entire population, Lestache seized the opportunity and built, in the banks of the River Xuvia, mills that supplied flour –and, therefore, bread– not only Ferrol but also nearby villages such as Pontedeume or Betanzos. The production capacity of the factories was so high that, many times, the surplus was exported to foreign countries, mainly America, in oak watertight barrels.
The village of Ferrol and the Terra de Trasancos at the end of the 18th century were a true melting pot of people coming from different areas of Spain and abroad in the pursuit of money. Many came seeking jobs at the arsenais reais and the auxiliary industries that sprouted and others, such as Juan Lestache, came drawn by the commercial opportunities.
Among the foreign immigrants, the French were the largest groups, favoured by the Pacto de Familia signed by Carlos III and the French king Luís XV in 1761. By 1797, there were 85 French, 40 Italian and 16 Portuguese immigrants in Ferrol. They were an extremely active community and they knew how to support each other by establishing frequent partnerships and societies.
Among the most notable ones: Juan Lestache and Francisco Bucau, proprietors of the fábrica de harina de Xuvia; Santiago Beujardin and Juan Lembeye, who built the muino das Aceas do Xuvia o Ponto (Narón) o a Mathias Dufoire. They created a close-knit trade network at an international level and a modern infrastructure of flour mills by the banks of the Xuvia and the outskirts of Ferrol and the Terra de Trasancos.
One of these buildings, whose construction is attributed to the French, is the unique windmill at San Mateo, in the San Mateo de Trasancos parish –nowadays run down–, which had the typical circular tower with a cone-shaped revolving roof.
The restoration of the Xuvia Industrial Mills was possible thanks to the monumental toil of archaeologist, historian and archivist at Narón’s council Andrés Pena Graña. For years, he revised all the documentation about Juan Lestache, his family, the flour factories and all the related businesses, scattered across different archives, to thoroughly reconstruct the fascinating story of the flour industries by the River Xuvia and of the history of Narón.
The volume of documents studied by Pena Graña is truly impressive since it includes Lestache’s correspondence, legal proceedings and even testamentary inventories, which inform about extremely precise details such as the mill operation, the machinery used, the hourly and yearly production, the value of Lestache’s properties and businesses or the commercial exchanges performed all over the world.
Moreover, his inquiries approached Juan Lestache’s personal history and that of his descendants and wife, María López, who stirred up the social conventions of the time after getting married for the second time, after the Frenchman demise, with a humble lad much younger than her.
The investigation appeared in different publications, being the most important one “Industriais e reais fábricas de Narón en tempos da Ilustración” (Narón’s Industrial and Royal Factories during the Age of the Enlightenment), edited by Narón’s council in 2007, which was crucial for fully restoring the mills and for the current CIMIX exhibition project.
