Date Published: 15/04/2021
ARCHIVED - Researchers recreate lost Huelva port from which Columbus set sail in 1492 to discover America
The port in Palos de la Frontera, Huelva (Andalusia) has been excavated and there are plans to open it up for visits in the future.
Researchers from the University of Huelva have made a recreation of the port in Palos de la Frontera from which Christopher Columbus set sail for America in 1492.
A team of scientists from several of the university’s departments have, through geological and chemical analysis, gone back six million years to determine the changes the land has undergone over time. This process has allowed them to create a detailed scale model of how the port and docks were laid out at the time of the departure of the Columbus expedition and to predict how the area, and others like it, will change in the future.
By tunnelling down into the ground and removing samples of soil, fossils and vegetation, the researchers tracked the evolution of the port, which was completely immersed in silt in the hundreds of years following the departur of the columbus expedition and is now part of the urban structure of the town.
By 1492, when Columbus set off, sediment was already building up in the Palos de la Frontera channel, they found, making sailing quite complicated. The water would have been somewhere between three and four metres deep, they have determined, far from its original depth of around nine metres and La Pinta and La Niña (two of the three ships that set out on the famous expedition) are known to have had unladen drafts of almost two metres.
As time went by, sediment built up even more and eventually led to the cessation of activity at the port, which was effectively swallowed up by the land.
A team from the university has excavated the port to recreate and exhibit it in the future.
The researchers are also continuing to study fossils in the Guadalquivir Bay, where they have found evidence of a wide range of marina fauna including whales and sharks from millions of years ago when the area was underwater.
Moreover, they are focusing on looking for evidence of past tsunamis and tidal waves and their consequences on land to help predict the possibility of them occurring in the future. Signs have already been found in Doñana and Gibraltar, and scientists believe that tsunamis could have been involved in the commercial decline of the area in the period of Roman occupation.
Images: Fundación Descubre/Universidad de Huelva
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