Article June 13, 1901 Issue

Where the Corks come from

Vast Cork Forests of Spain and Portugal.

Boston Herald

The application of cork as a stopper for liquid vessels is said to be of great antiquity. The earliest record extant of its use in Europe is that mentioned by Horace, who asserts that the Romans had corks as stoppers for their wine amphorae. Certain of the uses of cork were known to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians; but whether they used cork for stopping the mouths of their liquid vessels, history does not say.

It was not until the year 1760 that the Spaniards first began to work their cork woods with some degree of regularity for the making of corks. Although, perhaps, corks were more or less in use from the time glass bottles were first invented, in the fifteenth century, yet it was not until two and one half centuries later that the Spaniards began to prepare cork for bottle stoppers, which they did in a forest situated at the northeast of the Tigueras, on the Muge. The cork industry has since gradually risen to be one of the first magnitude, its chief centre in Spain being in Catalonia, where many thousand persons are employed.

They cork forests of Spain cover an area of six hundred and twenty thousand acres, producing the finest cork in the world.

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