History of La Carolina
The town was founded by King Carlos III in 1767, at the suggestion of the Treasury Commissioner Miguel Muzquiz, under the Sierra Morena Plan for New Colonization Villages. The settlement of new colonists from France and Germany was implemented by the Minister, Pablo de Olavide, administrator of Andalusia. Influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, the village was laid out on a grid of parallel and perpendicular streets, still visible today.
The construction of the main nucleus of the town was completed in 1770, with the participation of transhumants from other parts of Spain, among which the Herranz from Bronchales (Teruel) stand out. On March 22, 1795, Tomás González Carvajal was appointed intendant of the Nuevas Poblaciones de Andalucía and Sierra Morena (new towns of Andalusia and Sierra Morena), and superintendent of Almuradiel in La Mancha. La Carolina is the capital of the 12 Nuevas Poblaciones (new towns).
Six thousand Catholic settlers arrived from Belgium, Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 1767 to take advantage of the generous offers of land and livestock being made to colonisers (five chickens, five goats, five sheep, two cows, and a sow per family). Within a few years, about half of this new population had died from illness or gone home: the rest gradually lost their national identities, and took on the language and customs of their host country. You can still find people in this area with Germanic surnames such as Eisman, Minch, Smidt and Kobler.
The project of the Nuevas Poblaciones would be one of the greatest reforming projects in the history of Spain; a project that contemplated the creation of forty-four towns and eleven cities in the plains of La Parrilla and Sierra Morena to rid these areas of bandits, better exploit the land and generate wealth, while securing the Madrid-Cádiz road through which most of the merchandise traffic from America passed.
Pablo de Olavide himself made an effort to turn La Carolina into one of the most active population centres in Spain at the time; in 1775, there were cloth, silk, earthenware and hat factories here, and the process was accompanied by a resurgence of mining in this area at the end of the eighteenth century. This led to significant population growth, until at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the progressive decline of the population began. This was aggravated further by the events and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Starting in the 1960s, a process of demographic and industrial recovery began that has continued to this day.