Elche

Elche El Palmeral Costa Blanca Spain

Elche

Elche El Palmeral

Elche has a compact mass of date palm plantations that completely surrounds what was the Muslim city of Elche, the medieval Vila Murada (Walled Town). Their limits are clearly defined by roads and streets. Currently embedded in the city, the Urban Palmeral is perceived as a large, picturesque city park. Quite a number of palm plantations here have lost their original agronomic functions. Nevertheless, as a clear example of sustainable development, the palm trees have been preserved in spite of the changing use of land. Moreover, the City Council is now promoting the restoration of many irrigated parcels to their original agrarian functions.

The Palmeral of Elche is a unique cultural landscape of outstanding universal value and significance.

The Palmeral of Elche is the core area, oriented towards intensive horticulture, of an irrigation system established by the founders of the Islamic city of Elche a thousand years ago.

The expansion of Islam from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean, throughout the belt of arid lands that encircles the southern borders of the Old World, made possible the synthesis of a revolutionary culture of water, thanks to the fusion of the millennial Persian, Arab and Saharan agrarian traditions.

The peasants of Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, were thus able to maximize the profitability of the scarce waters of the almost desert lands of Elche through the rational planting and management of date palms, according to age-old Near Eastern principles.

In Elche, symmetrically planted palm trees define the boundaries of the irrigated plots, all along the ditches distributing the waters of the Vinalopó river, forming a living screen that reduced excessive exposure to sun and winds, thus also reducing evaporation. This micro climate helped associated crops to grow in the palm-enclosed fields called horts (huertos ), producing a well-defined agrarian landscape, called "Palmeral" in Elche, and "Oasis" in the rest of the world.

As a result, in lands where simple irrigation procedures might only have produced an insufficient cereal crop, intensive multilevel agriculture (from treetop to ground level: date palms, fruit trees and vegetables) was instituted, stimulating palm-related crafts and freeing nearby land for the grazing of sheep. The Palmeral, Elche's oasis, represents an extraordinary example of sustainability in the agrarian development of fragile ecosystems.

The fortune of Al-Andalus, Islamic Spain, commonly identified with monuments such as the Alhambra palace of Granada or the Mosque of Córdoba, was built on the revolutionary agrarian foundations that the Palmeral represents.

No landscape similar to the Palmeral of Elche can be found in Europe, apart from some smaller palm groves in Southeastern Spain. It is no accident that its parallels are to be found in the desert strip that connects Iran to the Maghreb.

The high yields of the Andalusian irrigated agrarian landscapes caused the medieval Christian conquerors to make their best efforts to preserve them, if not to enlarge them. And it was through the Spanish conquistadores and missionaries of the Modern Era, descendants of those Christian conquerors of the Middle Ages, that the millennial culture of water of Arab, Iranian and Saharan origins reached the New World.

All along the XIX century, the technical refinement of the Muslim irrigation systems of Eastern Spain caught the attention of the British and French authorities concerned with the economic development of their African and Asian colonies. A legion of engineers and geographers came to Valencian lands to learn how our traditional hydraulic systems worked: François-Jacques Jaubert de Passa, Maurice Aymard, Jean Brunhes among the French; and J. P. Roberts, Colin Scott Moncrieff, F. W. Schonnemann and Clements R. Markham, among the British.

The Palmeral of Elche, the core area of an Andalusian irrigation system adapted to water scarcity, is an extraordinary representative of Valencian huerta landscapes, a type of cultural landscape that, despite its regional locale, embodies a deep and rich history of cultural practices.

It is in this context where the Palmeral of Elche acquires its unique cultural character, as well as its unquestionable universal value.

The Palmeral represents the genius of Mankind in the mastery of water; a genius that made it possible to turn deserts into gardens throughout the World, displaying a kind of technological wisdom that still offers extraordinary and profitable lessons of sustainability in agricultural development.

The Palmeral is a living testimony of a bygone civilization: Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. Just as the Alhambra and the Mosque of Cordoba recall the glory of the Muslim rulers of Al-Andalus, the Palmeral represents the strenuous efforts of generations of anonymous peasants who, with the work of their bare hands, turned a desert into Paradise. The cultural splendor of Al-Andalus is inconceivable without considering the hard and artful work of the Andalusian peasantry.

The Andalusian Palmeral of Elche, which represents an exemplary aspect of the Islamic pattern of landscape setting, has withstood historical challenges of enormous significance, like the Christian Conquest in the XIII century, the Expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, and the modern Industrial and Urban Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, due to the perfection of its design as a productive space in Elche.