La conservación del patrimonio agroindustrial. Propuestas para la reutilización de los antiguos mataderos municipales y análisis de costes

An increasing demand for food in urban areas coupled with advances in transport systems and the development of new energy sources sparked off the emergence of the agri-food industry in rural Spain in the late nineteenth century. A particular example of this agro-industrial heritage is the municipal slaughterhouses built to prevent illegal slaughter of cattle and improve the hygienic conditions of meat. The increasing technical and hygienic requirements for this type of constructions and their gradual replacement by more modern private slaughterhouses led to the closure and subsequent abandonment of many of these buildings in the 80s and subsequent decades. This paper shows four specific proposals for the reuse of this type of constructions. From the information and data collected from several final-year projects developed by students of the School of Agricultural Engineering at the Technical University of Madrid, the rehabilitation works required in each case are described and a study of the costs is provided, comparing them with average expenses derived from building a completely new building.