General

The Glass Blowing Factory

According to history, the Romans were responsible for expanding, promoting and spreading the technique of the handmade blown glass in the Mediterranean area.

I’m sure that people who work the glass need healthy lungs, to be patient and precise.

Professionals use a long thin tube to continuously blow a molten and heated mass of glass to create different objects that could be a bottle, an ashtray or a glass bottle for olive-oil . It is an industrious artisanal process that can be made also with moulds using machines.

The manufacturing of artisanal blown glass in Mallorca started in the 18th century with Gordiola, a company situated in Algaida, a charming Mallorcan village.

The Gordiola’s building was inaugurated more than fifty years ago. It is a kind of manor house where you can see its employees using the oven heating to 1.200 degrees Celsius. It is also a museum with interesting pieces of glass from places all over the world and a shop.

Mallorca has two more glass factories a part from Gordiola.

La Fiore - where the craftsmen produce a beautiful glass olive-oil bottle amongst other products. They work with recycled glass which result in an environmentally friendly performance through an innovative project. Their products are not mass-produced, each pieces is unique.

In Menestralia, the other Mallorcan glass factory, the artisans don't have limits. They gave up the industrialization to maintain the magical environment produced by an age-old trade.

In this factory the glass is smelted during eight hours in an oven at 1.300 degrees Celsius. After that different minerals are added to obtain different colours. At the end of the process, when objects are finished, they will be introduced in other oven called “arca corredera” for four hours to reach room temperature.