Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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NATURE
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The Conservation of a
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Sarah R. Hamilton
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22 21 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1
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Preface xv
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List of Abbreviations xix
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Introduction 3
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Bibliography 257
Index 279
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FOREWORD
The Lake as a Microcosm
Paul S. Sutter
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medieval city of Salamanca, Spain, for the tenth World Wilderness Con
gress (WILD 10), a gathering dedicated to furthering a global vision
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land use, might see the return of wilderness. This vision is not entirely
far-fetched; recent trends in Europe—rural land abandonment, the
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graphic changes, and Salamanca was thus an apt place to advance such
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a vision.
This vision of a rewilded Europe is a hopeful one, and it has ani-
mated several fascinating experiments across the continent, but it is not
without its hazards. As a pure category, wilderness carries within its
genetic material a few traits that may express themselves in ways that
would be less than ideal for European conservation as a whole. The first,
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simply put, is the belief that self-willed land—wilderness in its literal
meaning—is environmentally optimal, and that any human tinkering,
even for the sake of biodiversity or other biocentric ends, is a distortion
of the natural. There are good reasons for advocating such passive man-
agement under some circumstances, but plenty of evidence suggests
that certain cultural landscapes, absent active human management, will
see their biodiversity decline or will change in ways that are ecologically
disadvantageous. Letting nature take its own course may be the philo-
sophically satisfying thing to do, particularly if one has a monotheistic
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faith in a nature that knows best, but it is not always the most produc-
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trait of wilderness thinking is the assumption that human work for sus-
tenance or profit is a sin against wild nature. Rewilding, with its empha-
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will they make room for rewilding and the benefits it may bring without
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ter lake that sits just inland from the Mediterranean coast and immedi-
ately south of the city of Valencia, is renowned for its biodiversity—
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particularly its bird life—and is prized as a natural haven for nearby city
dwellers. Since the 1980s, Valencian law has protected the lake and the
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Park. Among Spaniards and foreign tourists alike, the Albufera is best
known as the home of paella, the constituent parts of which have long
been produced and gathered in and around the lake. Indeed, paella is a
cultural expression of the Albufera’s rich environmental history, a culi-
nary manifestation of how locals have made their lives in this place.
x | Foreword
Although it is protected as a natural park, the Albufera is also a hearth
of Valencian culture and worth protecting as such.
For millennia people have relied upon the ready resources of the
Albufera, and for centuries they have substantially manipulated the
landscape to control and channel its productivity, part of a larger
regional effort that transformed Valencia into an irrigated Eden. As
they transformed the Albufera from a brackish lagoon into a teeming
freshwater lake, and eventually into a vast expanse of enclosed rice
fields, Valencian farmers clashed with fishermen and hunters who pro-
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dant fish and game, and a refuge for wildlife coexisted tenuously. The
twentieth century changed all of that.
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erty, was as much about culture as nature, even if it was not always
sensitive to the actual needs of the agrarian producers that it roman-
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Foreword | xi
influence within the regime, and conservation advocacy became a non-
threatening way for a small group of experts to temper Franco’s visions
of rapid modernization. But then the Franco regime brought dense
urban resort development to the Albufera and its adjoining beaches,
and thus significant pollution and habitat destruction. In response to
these specific threats, and as the social and environmental costs of other
urban modernization projects fell disproportionately on the poor and
working classes in cities like Valencia, environmental justice issues rose
to the fore. By the final years of the Franco regime, the Albufera had
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mental movement that, as Hamilton puts it, mixed “concern for natural
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When Franco died in 1975, the Albufera entered yet another phase,
this time as a contested natural area during Spain’s integration into the
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cultural importance of the place, either in terms of its deep local his-
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after its preservation as a park were actually a nadir for the Albufera’s
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xii | Foreword
united farmers, fishermen, ecologists, and urban recreationists, who
together recognized that the existing state of affairs served no one’s
interests well. Farmers also made good use of new European Union
policies such as direct subsidy payments and mechanisms for branding
heritage rice varieties, which gave them the economic breathing room
to find common ground with conservationists. Finally, new park leader-
ship listened to rice farmers and other traditional users of the Albufera,
opening lines of communication that created compromise, common
ground, and a robust community of interest. The results over the last
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quarter century have not been perfect, but, Hamilton concludes, they
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in a human-made world.
As Cultivating Nature masterfully demonstrates, the small world of
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the Albufera not only encapsulates Spain’s larger political and environ-
mental history but also reveals the many scales at which that history
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rice farmers would likely mask the lake’s cultural history without any
real promise of better environmental results than the current regime
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best suited to protecting this dynamic place, no one best way to pre-
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serve the Albufera. There are only better political and social arrange-
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ments for doing so: regimes that are collaborative, respectful of culture
and nature, adaptive to historical contingencies, and humble in the face
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scapes like the Albufera. The key to conserving these special places, as
Sarah Hamilton poignantly demonstrates, is not to remove local users
but to empower them. If rewilding comes at the expense of places like
the Albufera and the people who have made them, it will be a hollow
victory.
Foreword | xiii
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PREFACE
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Towel in hand, trekking over the dunes on my way to the beach one
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wondered, had become of the urbanization itself, and why did the area
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appear untouched despite what must have been at one time a massive
earth-moving project?
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Manhole cover from the urbanization of the Devesa, 1971. Photo by Javier
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Jiménez Romo.
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and their time. I owe a special debt to Joan Miquel Benavent, who spent
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the Albufera Natural Park, and to Francisco Pérez Puche, whose knowl-
edge of Valencia and extensive personal and professional networks
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enormously enriched the story I was able to tell. Thanks also to the
many archivists, librarians, and unofficial document keepers who pro-
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xvi | Preface
the Horta, while the Castilian Dehesa is referred to by the Valencian
Devesa. Other places and geographic features (Catarroja, Júcar River,
Gola del Pujol) remain in their better-known Castilian variants to avoid
confusion. All translations are my own.
I am indebted to many scholars for their support and assistance over
the time I spent working on this project, but none so much as Dario
Gaggio and Douglas Northrop. I thank them both for many years of
intellectual engagement, sound advice, and friendship. Gabrielle
Hecht, Richard Tucker, Minayo Nasiali, Dan Hirschman, John Soluri,
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encouragement. The hard work of Paul Sutter, Catherine Cocks, and two
anonymous reviewers, along with other editors and staff at the Univer-
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ysis, which appears in revised and expanded form in this book, were
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192, no. 781 (Sept.–Oct. 2016): a346. Funding from the Fulbright Com-
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during my visits to Spain and the process of writing and revision that
followed.
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gan, Gene, Sara, and Rosie Cassidy, Chester Gaggio, Dan Hirschman,
Minayo Nasiali, and Rebecca Wall; to my comrades in arms at Auburn
University, Chase Bringardner, Jenny Brooks, Donna Bohanan, Kate
Craig, Kelly Kennington, Matt Malczycki, Eden McLean, and Alan
Meyers; and to my adopted Segovian family, Paco Sánchez, Cristina
Catalina, and the extended Peña-Chimeno clan, for many years of
Preface | xvii
laughter, conversation, and commiseration. I am eternally grateful for
the support and inspiration of my brilliant, globe-trotting family,
especially Warren, Alicita, Leslie, and Larry Hamilton, who passed
on their wanderlust, their indefatigable curiosity, and their passion for
the outdoors. My mother, Leslie, also provided countless critical read-
ings and editorial suggestions, demonstrating saintlike dedication and
a surprising gift for poetry. Finally I thank my partner, Ritch Melton,
who kept the house from falling down around me while I wrote and
whose support, patience, and humor brighten my life every day.
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xviii | Preface
ABBREVIATIONS
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Farmers’ Association
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
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Institute
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OTDA Oficina Técnica Devesa-Albufera, Devesa-Albufera
Technical Office
PDO Protected Designation of Origin
PSOE Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Spanish Socialist
Workers’ Party
SEO Sociedad Española de Ornitología, Spanish Ornitho-
logical Association
TEVASA Terrenos de Valencia, S.A., Valencian Lands, Ltd.
WWF World Wildlife Fund (later World Wide Fund for
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Nature)
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xx | Abbreviations
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Cultivating Nature
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INTRODUCTION
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God made the country and the riverside farmers made the Horta.
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summer weekends. Turn to the east, down one of the short access roads,
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park your car in a broad dirt lot, and stroll down a wood-plank pathway
through grass-covered dunes to reach the white sand beaches, where
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skies. From the water’s edge you can watch heavy cargo ships approach-
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ing the port of Valencia, the largest in the Mediterranean basin, a few
kilometers to the north. Behind you, a dozen high-rise apartment build-
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For lunch, you will need to pack up your towel and hit the road
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again, branching away from the coast to the southwest. By car, you can
reach the hamlet of El Palmar in about ten minutes. On the way you
will pass a visitors’ center and the high fences of a bird refuge as you
follow the coastline of a large shallow lake, largely hidden behind dense
reeds and bracken. From a fishing dock just next to the road, you can
catch an unobstructed view of calm water stretching westward toward
3
distant mountains. A few matas, dense islands of reeds and mud,
break the surface, surrounded by paddling ducks. The name of the lake
derives from the medieval period, when Valencia’s Muslim rulers called
it al-buhayra, or “little sea,” the same generic designation they applied
to other coastal lagoons. By the early modern period, this designation
had become a proper noun: the Albufera de Valencia.
For millennia, the Albufera has been a working landscape, an eco-
logically rich space actively used and modified by fishermen, farmers,
and pleasure-seekers who have inscribed their own meanings upon it
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Today, the most obvious use of the land is agricultural, and in the sum-
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mer a vast expanse of brilliant green rice fields extends to the south and
west beyond the lake. Locals have perfected dozens of distinctive rice
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dishes, but paella is by far the most famous. Foreigners associate the
saffron-colored dish with the country as a whole, but it is a specifically
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varied glory,” over Spanish cuisine as a whole and had done so “without
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in the city itself and in the other towns surrounding the lake.
Paella has featured prominently in Valencian advertising and post-
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cards for over a century and today brings thousands of gastronomic tour-
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ists to the region. Its origins lie in the rice fields of the mid-nineteenth
century, where laborers added whatever they had at hand—typically eels,
snails, seasonally available vegetables, and the occasional water vole—to
the wide, shallow pan that gives the dish its name and simmered their
midday meal with the same water that irrigated their fields. As its pop
ularity spread, variants emerged based on local tastes and ingredient
4 | introduction
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Map 1. The Albufera Natural Park. The Turia River was rerouted to its current
location in the 1960s; its original course ran through the heart of the city. Map
by Leo Popovic
availability. Pardo Bazán’s 1913 book of “old Spanish” recipes included
three versions of paella cooked in lard with a variety of meats, sausages,
fish, beans, and vegetables, none of which are likely to be served in a
modern restaurant.3 While seafood and vegetarian versions are popu-
lar, over the years a consensus has formed around a standard list of
ingredients for a true paella valenciana. Short-grain rice, chicken, rab-
bit, beans, paprika, and tomatoes are essential; artichoke, duck, and
snails are permissible additives, and sprigs of rosemary can be substituted
for the snails in a pinch. The rice variety of choice is Bomba, a native
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Valencian strain that can absorb more than three times its volume in
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tions of lesser rice dishes as “paella” draw furious responses from the
local population. When British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver posted a
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recipe for “chicken and chorizo paella” on his website, for instance, the
condemnation was swift and overwhelming.4 “Remove the chorizo,”
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and chips out of “beef and ravioli” or “aubergines with duck.”6 “Paella
is not just a terrible version of rice with things,” a Valencian archaeolo-
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gist posted, along with a photograph of his family and friends gathered
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tional support. Three local varieties of rice (Bomba, Senia, and Albu
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variety in 1997, while Bomba, the oldest of the three, dates to around
1913. The rice fields themselves appeared only in the nineteenth century,
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before which the area they now occupy lay beneath the waters of the
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lake. These facts have not mitigated that Valencian rice in general and
the PDO varieties in particular have figured prominently within a
broader foodscape of regional culture and identity that is prominently
marketed in the context of international tourism.
Like the dish itself, the landscape in which paella was born is a cen-
tral part of Valencian identity. Modern visitors who hire local boatmen
6 | introduction
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Valencians who have used the lake as an escape from the city for more
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hunters for longer still and today make Valencia a major destination for
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introduction | 7
areas called dune slacks, lined with impermeable, highly saline soils
that harbor a unique and extremely fragile set of specially adapted
organisms. Just east of the slacks are the dunes themselves, anchored
by creeping plants and sea grasses. All of this topographic and eco-
logical diversity is tightly packed together, with no more than a kilome-
ter separating the lake from the sea. The entire system is known as la
Dehesa in Castilian or la Devesa in the local language of Valencian,
both etymologically derived from the Latin defensa, meaning “pro-
tected” or “defended.” Across the Iberian Peninsula, this name denotes
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Devesa, wildlife and tourists have replaced the cattle that roamed there
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before the first farmers sowed rice in the saline marshes surrounding the
lake. It was the birds that first brought native Iberian foragers to the area
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sometime in the unrecorded past. By the first century BCE, Roman colo-
nists had arrived as well, settling on a bend in the Turia River at a site
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A natural channel through the Devesa, called a gola, connected the lake
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to the sea and allowed water to flow both ways, while springs of mineral-
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rich freshwater from subterranean aquifers and runoff from a vast catch-
ment area slightly diluted the salty water of the lake. Over the years,
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prairie of rooted vegetation. More than thirty kinds of fish, from the
tiny autochthonous toothcarp known as samaruc and fartet to massive
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sea bass that wandered in through the gola, swam through the briny
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8 | introduction
Roman Valentia fell to the Alans, then the Visigoths, and finally to
Muslims from North Africa in the eighth century, ushering in a new
era in which the city was an important trade port and the center of the
Taifa of Valencia. As the urban population grew, a few groups ventured
into more enduring settlements near the lakeshore. Fishermen made
a seasonal camp on a palm-covered peninsula in the southeast, later
called El Palmar, and plied the waters of the lake in search of eels and
other salt-tolerant fish.11 To the north, another community of laborers
collected salt from a flat on the lake’s eastern shore and loosed their
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conquered the Taifa in 1238, he promptly claimed the lake and its forest
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for himself, setting wardens to guard the wealth of birds and beasts to
be found there. This royal reserve passed to the Spanish Crown when
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to the coast and the city, among his fellow Catalan-speakers, but most
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of the new settlers in the drier lands of the interior were Castilian-
speaking Aragonese. As a result the kingdom possessed a cultural
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over the Castilian ones that predominated across most of the Iberian
peninsula.12 Over the centuries, local vocabulary and pronunciation
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introduction | 9
For most of the past three centuries, that distinct identity has
revolved around irrigated agriculture, introduced under the medieval
Muslim rulers, who also brought rice, citrus, and other major crops to
Iberia. In the first large-scale irrigation on the peninsula, the Muslims
diverted water from the Turia River into the fields immediately sur-
rounding Valencia, including the northern half of the Albufera, in a
region that became known as l’Horta, or “the vegetable garden.” Jaume
I expanded on this infrastructure after his conquest. Over the course
of generations, plural inheritance and sale divided his original land
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which remained viable despite their small size because of the increased
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who did not grow mulberry trees themselves intensified their produc-
tion of staple crops to supply their silk-producing neighbors and new
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Although this shift led to dramatic changes all along the coast, some
of the most significant occurred along the lower Júcar River, or Ribera
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Baixa region. New canals diverted water from the Júcar into the fields
that bordered the Albufera to the west and south, within the towns of
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Sollana, Silla, Sueca, Cullera, and others. Canals and ditches drained
excess water from the fields into the lake, where it diluted the salt
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water and eventually poured into the sea through the gola. Like the
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Horta, which harnessed the water of the Turia, farms in the Ribera
Baixa soon produced three or more harvests a year of high-value fruits,
vegetables, nuts, cereals, and industrial crops (hemp, flax, and mul-
berry), the vast majority of which were exported. By the end of the
eighteenth century, 44 percent of all irrigated land on the Iberian Pen-
insula lay within the former Kingdom of Valencia.14
10 | introduction
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Richard Twiss proclaimed the lands surrounding the city “one of the
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“The land in this fertile valley never rests, for no sooner is one crop
removed, than the farmer begins to prepare it for another.”17 “It seems
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almost the only place where the Spaniards are industrious in the cul-
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render this valley agreeable.” Across the continent, such reports gave
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lifeways of the people who lived nearby. In 1639, King Felipe IV’s local
representative wrote disapprovingly that the lake was “full of fresh
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water, and so many reeds that you can sail upon it only with difficulty,
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and such a lack of fish that one suspects that there will be no one who
will wish to rent it.” A few decades later the salt flat (salar) on the Devesa
vanished entirely, leaving behind only the village of El Saler that bears
its name. The royal agent despaired that “the lake is lost, as there is
neither the abundance of fish that there was, nor are those that remain
of such good quality, as they are fresh water fish.” Fishermen based in
12 | introduction
the lakeside towns sank deeper into poverty, and many sought work on
the newly irrigated farms that proliferated around them.18
Among those farms were a growing number of rice paddies,
reclaimed from the marshes immediately surrounding the Albufera.
Following the Reconquest, antimalarial regulations had forbidden rice
cultivation outside of natural wetlands, and few Valencians had been
willing to risk the mosquito-ridden, miasmatic conditions when safer
and more profitable fields were available on higher ground. The expan-
sion of export markets for grain during the eighteenth century coin-
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tion canals and regulated by simple sluices, gravity carried water into
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the tancats and eventually out again, into the lake, at the proper point
in the rice’s growing cycle. Technically, as these enclosures reclaimed
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land that had previously lain below the waterline, the tancats infringed
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there was little risk of official sanction. For the same reasons, as tancat
construction progressed concentrically toward the center of the lake
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and reduced the area of open water, local courts overruled furious pro-
tests from fishermen that the expansion of rice fields compromised their
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own ability to make use of the lake. In 1761 King Carlos III established
a series of ordinances unequivocally recognizing rice farming as the
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introduction | 13
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The Albufera in 1761. The first land reclamation for rice cultivation can be
seen around the perimeter of the lake. El Palmar is located on the long peninsula
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on the left (south). The Albufera Natural Park (map 1) today occupies an area
slightly larger than the lake itself in 1761. Map by Juan Bautista Romero, 1761,
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the Royal Júcar Canal in the early nineteenth century, diverting almost
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the entire flow of the river into the fields of the Ribera Baixa and perma-
nently displacing the lake’s once-salty water with fresh. Each May, the
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largest tancat owners closed the gola linking the lake to the sea, walling
it off with reeds, sticks, branches and clay in order to raise the level of
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the lake, flood their fields, and prevent sea water from washing in and
killing their crops. Fishermen responded to this interruption of fish
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14 | introduction
century. Control over all of the golas remained entirely with the farmers,
independent of any municipal or regional authorities. In May when the
rice seedlings required standing water, the farmers closed the golas and
bottled up irrigation water within their fields. In August they opened the
golas and the low dikes surrounding their tancats, allowing the stagnant
water to drain out through the lake into the sea.22 In the tancats closer
to the center of the lake, where the underlying land sloped too gently for
gravity to do all the work, the owners of adjoining lands pooled resources
to build steam-driven pumps to empty their fields.23
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and allowed seasonal precipitation and runoff to raise the lake’s levels
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in a winter flooding called the perellonà. While not necessary for rice
cultivation, during the perellonà the waters rose to cover the dikes
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and walls separating each tancat from its neighbors, allowing laborers
to reach every part of the fields by boat. They used this opportunity to
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repair walls, fill in depressions, and otherwise maintain the land. The
water brought in fresh nutrients and washed away mineral accumula-
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tions that had built up over the previous season, thereby improving the
soil for the following season’s crop.
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gobbled down loose grains of rice along with the insects, amphibians,
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small fish, plants, and algae that made up their traditional diet. Hunters
from around the country paid high prices for the privilege of spending
a day, rifle in hand, lying in wait in a half-submerged barrel alongside
the matas. A typical expedition could net a decent marksman well
upwards of a hundred trophies before he headed back to shore for a
well-deserved paella.24
introduction | 15
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A day of shooting at the lake, 1875. Etching shows a view of the Albufera from
the Devesa. At top right, a hunter stands in a submerged barrel to shoot ducks
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y Americana 19, no. 44 (Nov. 30, 1875): 348. Image from Google Books
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“delightful lake.” Yet the new Albufera had its own beauty, its own rich
ecosystems, and its own cultural importance. Many of the animals that
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had once populated the natural wetlands moved into the artificial ones
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that had displaced them. When the golas were closed each spring and
the lake level rose with the influx of irrigation water, fish scattered into
the fields, frustrating fishermen but bringing new food sources for wad-
ing birds. Elite hunting expeditions to the region continued, and the
boatmen of El Palmar and Catarroja eagerly served as guides and ferry-
men for wealthy visitors. The wild forests and wetlands encountered
16 | introduction
by the settlers at ancient Valentia had indisputably harbored greater
biodiversity than the agricultural landscape that replaced them, but a
vast and complicated new network of organisms thrived in the condi-
tions created and preserved by the rice fields around the lake. That
network occupied a central place in the local cultural imagination and
held the “integrity, stability, and beauty” that Aldo Leopold would later
identify as integral characteristics of the modern Land Ethic.25
This book details the still more dramatic changes that took place in
the Albufera over the course of the twentieth century. Despite its long
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lake, beaches, fields, and all—as the Albufera Natural Park (Parc Natu-
ral de l’Albufera de València) in the 1980s. The stillness of the forest,
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the soft undulations of the dunes, and the perfect calm of the lake offer
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scattered high-rises along the Devesa, the faded remnants of roads and
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invasive Asian carp and American crabs fishermen pull from the murky
lake. Timeless and traditional though it might appear, the Albufera is
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brown waters, the sun-baked beaches, and the waving fields of grain.
Farmers, politicians, urban families, and scientists assert competing
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legal and moral claims over the space. Residents and visitors alike
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infuse the varied terrain of the Albufera with meanings built on mem-
ory, myth, and tradition, their experiences of the area defined not only
by materiality but also by the cultural associations they ascribed to
specific places and forms of land use. Where one sees a productive
farm, another finds underutilized real estate, and still others delight in
a thriving wetland or a pleasant spot to spend the day. The distance
introduction | 17
between such visions created spaces for social and ideological conflict
over the past century, which themselves were part of larger debates
about conservation, economics, politics, and Spain’s place in the Euro-
pean polity. This book explores those debates and the people, ideas,
and ecosystems that shaped them. It argues that profoundly modified
and actively exploited spaces such as the Albufera are crucial to the
preservation of both biological and cultural diversity in modern Europe
and beyond.
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Working landscapes
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Rocky and White Mountains and the deserts of the American West had
trained me to view livestock as a menace to fragile tundra and soils, and
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the much smaller parks of Europe. As it turned out, grazing is just one
of many uses to which local residents put Spain’s most treasured natural
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spaces. Whole villages are situated within the country’s fifteen national
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trips into and through the parks. Their fields, walls, fences, homes, and
domestic animals provide picturesque bucolic vignettes within the
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ern regulations permit and in fact encourage far more intensive use by
rural people. The Albufera Natural Park, Valencia’s first and largest
protected natural space, is one such landscape. The park encompasses
El Palmar, El Saler, the Devesa, the lake, and approximately fourteen
thousand hectares of private land under active agricultural exploitation
and is governed by dozens of local, regional, national, and international
18 | introduction
laws that seek to preserve and enhance its unique contributions to
European patrimony. It is a profoundly, visibly modified landscape that
makes no pretense of preserving “pristine nature” and which continues
to support multiple extractive industries, yet it harbors significant
ecological value alongside a rich cultural history. The rice fields pro-
vide essential food and habitat for the park’s nonhuman denizens, espe-
cially the thousands of migratory and resident birds, and the plants
themselves serve as an essential “green filter” for the water of the lake,
transforming massive quantities of nitrogen, phosphates, and other
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contaminants into biomass before they reach the open water. They also
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provide a livelihood for more than eight thousand rice farmers, whose
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interests often run counter to those of the ecologists responsible for the
park’s management. The beaches, forests, and sand dunes, meanwhile,
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attract mass tourism from across Europe and around the world but also
serve as a city park and house their own complex ecosystems. These
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labor protected or created ecological value in the first place. In the most
extreme cases of “fortress conservation,” environmental historians and
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native people from their traditional lands, primarily but not exclusively
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habitation are part of the parks’ appeal. Dating back to the preservation
movements of the nineteenth century, activists on both sides of the
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introduction | 19
landscapes are essential to the aesthetic, moral, and national values they
embody. The English “cult of country life,” the German Landschaft
movement, and the universal appeal of the Tuscan countryside are only
some of the better-known examples in which natural, cultivated, and
built elements play equally prominent roles in concepts of what con-
stitutes an aesthetic, culturally valuable space. If in America ideas of
nature are centered in wilderness, in Europe they are centered in care-
fully managed forests, tidy hedgerows, dry olive groves, and green hill-
sides scattered with woolly sheep. In Valencia, long renowned as the
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not only tolerated but relied upon ongoing human actions. They thrive
as
tend watersheds and forests, plant and prune trees, set seasonal fires to
n
encourage new growth, enrich the land, cull wild herds, and build walls
gt
that hold down the soil. They grow crops that provide habitat and food
for wild animals, and they create and maintain waterways and wetlands
on
landscapes that most Europeans know and value and that current
conservation regimes seek to protect. Today, while less than 3 percent
of the territory in the European Union is governed in a way designed to
minimize the human presence, almost 18 percent consists of extensive
farmland and recently abandoned agricultural landscapes.31
20 | introduction
While recognizing the cultural and ecological value of extensive
primary production, however, European conservation regimes have
fetishized the countryside in ways that hinder rural communities’ sur-
vival within the global market economy. Regional, national, and inter-
national environmental regulations essentialize rural life and sharply
circumscribe the extent to which local people can modify or modernize
their tools and techniques to adapt to new conditions. Farmers’ claims
over their lands are conditioned on a vision of authenticity derived from
essentialized notions of rural life that do not take economic and practi-
U
cal realities into account. When not erased from the scenic landscape
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altogether, farmers are valued for their work as stewards of the land or
ve
centuries.32 In some cases, they are subject to what Mark Dowie has
called “soft evictions,” in which their use of local resources is limited
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traditional lands.33
During the 1980s, shortly after the declaration of the Albufera Natu-
hi
were “the first ecologists,” and that “it is thanks to the farmers that
anything at all remains of the Albufera today.” “If we rice farmers have
on
introduction | 21
farmers, Maasai herdsmen, and other rural communities share the
experience of having created and safeguarded landscapes now seen as
valuable by external constituencies, only to find themselves bearing
new, uncompensated burdens as a result. As such, the conflicting values
and ideals showcased in the Albufera are broadly applicable to contem-
porary policy debates surrounding the management of heavily modified
spaces around the world.
The failure of many conservation regimes to adequately address
the material and ideological interests of the people they most directly
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tural and biological heritage.36 In some cases, this demographic shift left
room for the spontaneous regeneration of species that had been driven
rs
canals and rice fields simply vanish beneath siltation and fast-growing
as
22 | introduction
must take into account local and individual circumstances as well as
transnational environmental objectives. The Albufera is a valuable
example for people involved in conserving places that are not wilder-
ness, as a foil for the “rewilding” movement, and as a model for the
challenges of protecting an extremely complex and multilayered place.
While focused on a relatively small space, the chapters that follow
trace the broad outlines of Spanish environmental history in the
twentieth century, placing regional and national experiences within
the context of broad trends of international governance, globalizing
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tory, stressing treaties, gross national product, and foreign aid packages,
simultaneously positions Spain as a poor relation to its European neigh-
ity
century alone, Spain’s abstention from both World Wars, its exclusion
from postwar economic and diplomatic collaborations, and the tenacity
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unique spaces and species. The rise of interest in public health and
urban living conditions among working-class families and middle-class
progressives in the 1970s corresponded to similar movements in the UK,
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and beyond, though in the Spanish
case civic engagement with such issues was complicated by the condi-
tions of the late Franco era and the transition to democracy. In the 1980s
introduction | 23
and 1990s, Spain’s accession to the European Economic Community
(EEC) and rapid incorporation of international laws and regulations
reflected a widespread acceptance, at least at the level of cultural elites,
of the same environmental consciousness prominent elsewhere in
Europe, as well as a persistent gap between the laws as written and the
realities of their implementation on the ground. In all of these respects,
Spain’s history is no more or less unique than any other nation’s.
The ways in which people working directly with the land experi-
enced these broad trends and sought to reconcile them with their lived
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from tourist resort to wildlife refuge were rooted not only in Spanish
and Valencian trends but also in transnational currents of culture, poli-
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tics, and economics. This study thus walks a fine line between high-
as
source frames and scales, from local to global. Many of the events
described occurred amid the censorship and political infighting of the
es
Franco era (1939–75), and I have used oral histories to provide context
s
24 | introduction
years later. Comparing the two source frames provided a sense of the
role of the press and the nature of clandestine political activism in the
early 1970s. Official government archives, both those of the Franco
regime and of the democratic regional administrations that immedi-
ately succeeded it, posed their own challenges. Again, interviews with
people involved in Valencian land use policy during the democratic era
helped to triangulate between contending political perspectives, to fill
in gaps, and to clarify discrepancies in the written records. Oral histo-
ries have their own complications, of course, but in many cases I have
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While the Albufera’s story began some six thousand years ago, when
the deposition of sand across the mouth of a vast bay first separated the
rs
lake from the sea, I have chosen to limit my narrative to the long twen-
tieth century. Following years of instability and strife, the overthrow
ity
ing the Albufera and Devesa, to the state. The forty years that followed
encompassed the most radical period of land transformation in the
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ing water. For much of that period Spain was governed by the Bourbon
Restoration government, a nominal constitutional monarchy in which
hi
real power was strictly limited to a landowning oligarchy and the coun-
n
of the irrigated lands of the Horta and Ribera Baixa. Chapter 1 dem-
onstrates how this rose-tinted vision of Valencia offered a model for
technocratic ideas for Spanish modernization during the Restoration
period (1874–1931) and the Second Spanish Republic (1931–36), and in
particular for the belief that Spain’s fortunes depended on the degree
introduction | 25
to which the state could control the physical landscape. This belief gave
rise to ambitious plans to transform the countryside and to a simultane-
ous movement to protect aesthetic, recreational, scientific, and histori-
cally important spaces as parks and reserves. In Valencia, the latter
movement manifested in the city’s purchase of the Albufera from the
central government in order to halt rice farmers’ ongoing land reclama-
tion, laying the groundwork for a conflict between rural and urban
interests that would recur throughout the rest of the century.
Conservation efforts in Spain were interrupted by the outbreak of
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civil war in 1936, and the dictatorship that followed applied the full
ni
the regime, city boosters moved forward with a plan to privatize and
develop the Devesa despite objections from local scientists. There and
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26 | introduction
issues helped create a social space for protest, and control over physical
spaces provided a vehicle for deep critiques of the authoritarian regime.
The movement also provided a progressive origin story for contem-
porary urban claims over the space, in which control over the Albufera
and the Devesa by “the Valencian people” became central to concepts
of regional identity. During the post-Franco transition to democracy
(1975–86), environmental politics played a key role in Spain’s quest for
integration with the EEC. When the first elected governments took
control of national, regional, and local political apparatuses, they
U
enacted policies intended to bring the country into line with European
ni
tion of the Albufera Natural Park in 1986. The park’s boundaries and
regulatory scheme were derived entirely from ecological criteria as
rs
set forth by a group of politically active natural scientists, such that the
park’s declaration signaled the dominance of a new sort of expertise
ity
reorientation left the rice-farming families whose lands lay within the
boundaries of the new park, already under pressure from integration
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purchase of the park some sixty years earlier, public interest in protect-
ing a symbolic landscape trumped farmers’ claims of individual rights.
hi
introduction | 27
broadly applied to the experiences of farming communities across the
continent and offers rare insights into the practical applications of one
of Europe’s most contentious programs.
Existing environmental and agricultural policies have proven
insufficient, on their own, to meaningfully alter farming culture in
ways that can guarantee the long-term success of either conservation
or rural development objectives. At the dawn of the twenty-first
century, as the European agricultural sector continued to decline,
nature-lovers across the continent began to look at rewilding—the
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28 | introduction