Carved In Stone

- Young Lim

Looking at Cosentino’s sprawling headquarters that spans more than a million square metres, it’s hard to imagine that only a decade ago, this impressive network of production facilities and office buildings didn’t exist. Today, the site provides jobs for more than 1,200 employees living in the town of Macael, located in the Spanish province of Almería, and continues a legacy of working with stone for which the community is well known. According to the president and CEO of Cosentino, Francisco Martínez-Cosentino Justo, commonly known as Paco, the journey towards establishing Cosentino’s industrial park hasn’t been easy.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

In 1940, the first members of the Martinez Cosentino family started working in a marble quarry in Macael, manufacturing simple products from natural stone. Back then, the town was famed for its production of high quality white marble—Macael marble was a material sought after by renowned architects because of its unique colouration, owing to the distinct composition of natural minerals in the mountains surrounding the area.

Second-generation family members Paco and his brother decided to set up their own marble mining business in 1979. Paco’s initial attempts ended in failure as he realised that his quarries were not producing quality marble. “It was important to know the mountains and, unfortunately for us, we didn’t have good quarries for extracting white Macael marble in the early 1970s,” he recalls.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Paco finally discovered a quarry with a good vein that was producing high-quality Macael marble. However, by then, the amount of quality marble that could be extracted from Macael had dropped sharply—as did market demand for it. This resulted in the closure of many mines, and the community faced an imminent loss of livelihood.