The museum focuses on the pre-industrial era, when the extraction of molasses was hard and artisanal work.It uses the raw material, cane, as a common thread: from how it shaped the landscape of the area, how the sugar mills and crops proliferated, the harvest and the sugar production process.

It shows an extensive set of manufacturing parts available from the pre-industrial era as well as archaeological remains found in the rehabilitated Casa de la Palma, among which enormous presses stand out.

Sugar cane was one of the most important pre-industrial activities since Muslim times, and it was cultivated throughout the Mediterranean slope, from where it was taken to America. Currently this very Mediterranean crop is abandoned, and yet it has become the characteristic “flavor” of the American Caribbean.

As a relic of the past, in Motril today, excellent quality rum is still made.

1,200 years of history

The link between the Costa Tropical and sugar cane is dates back to the 10th century. Its cultivation is linked to the unbeatable conditions that the lands of the Guadalfeo Valley offered for its development. In the 17th century it was a true monoculture. From our coast, cane went to the Canary Islands and later to America, where it took root in such a way that it has been considered a substantial element of Caribbean culture.

Throughout the Modern Age, most of the economic life of the city revolved around the cultivation and processing of cane, demanding a large amount of labor and generating profits monopolized by the mill aviators, the large noble and ecclesiastical landowners and the Hacienda Real.

From the 1860s they settled in Motril up to seven sugar factories equipped with industrial technology and financed largely with capital from the local and Granada oligarchy, which constitutes an innovative element in an area until now characterized by the absence of industrialization.

Starting in 1900, sugar cane became a residual crop within the sugar sector, rapidly losing positions to beets. This inexorable process has produced its virtual disappearance, remaining exclusively testimonial crops.