CULTIVATING

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NATURE
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The Conservation of a
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Valencian Working Landscape

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Sarah R. Hamilton
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University of Washington Press

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Cultivating Nature: The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape is
published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental
Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation,
members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton

Copyright © 2018 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Interior design by Thomas Eykemans
Composed in OFL Sorts Mill Goudy, typeface designed by Barry Schwartz
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Cover design by Katrina Noble

Cover illustration: Fishing in the canals of the Albufera, circa 1933.
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Photographed by Defilis. Archivo Fotográfico del Patronato Nacional

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de Turismo (II República 1931– 1939). No. 00100. Caja 1. Biblioteca de la

Facultad de Empresa y Gestión Pública (Universidad de Zaragoza)
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22 21 20 19 18  5 4 3 2 1
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
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permission in writing from the publisher.

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University of Washington Press

www.washington.edu/uwpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

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ISBN (hardcover): 978-0-295-74331-8

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ISBN (ebook): 978-0-295-74332-5

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For my grandparents, Alicita and Warren Hamilton

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 CONTENTS
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Foreword: The Lake as a Microcosm, by Paul S. Sutter ix

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Preface xv
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List of Abbreviations xix
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Introduction 3
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One Creating the National Territory (1874–1936) 29

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Two Transformation and Conservation (1936–1970) 59

Three Landscapes “For the People” (1970–1974) 90

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Four Europeanization and the

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Albufera Natural Park (1975–1990) 127

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Five Crisis and Compromise (1991–2012) 159

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Conclusion: Managing the Albufera in a Changing World 187

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Appendix: Paella Valenciana 201

Notes 205
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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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In October of 2013, more than a thousand delegates convened in the

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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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for wilderness and wildlands conservation. While earlier WILD con-

gresses focused on bringing a western brand of wilderness preservation
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to the developing world, much of the conversation in Salamanca was

about the “rewilding” of Europe, or the possibility that the earth’s most
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densely populated continent, a region with a deep history of human

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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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decline of traditional farming systems, rapid urbanization, and conti-

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nental political and economic integration among them—have produced

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startling environmental changes. Rewilding is already occurring on its

own across the continent as millions of acres have lapsed from active
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human management, and the WILD 10 delegates hoped to push por-

tions of the continent further in that direction, allowing for the return
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of apex predators and greater possibilities for true European wilder-

ness experiences. Spain has been one of the epicenters for these demo-
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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,

ix
 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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tive approach from the standpoint of conservation biology. A second

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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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sis on people-less landscapes, often comes at the expense of European

agrarian traditions and the cultural landscapes, practices, and mean-
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ings they have produced. Where advocates of rewilding see opportu-

nity in Europe’s agricultural modernization and consolidation, many
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others—including those on the front lines of these wrenching changes—

experience loss. European conservationists thus face a challenge: how
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will they make room for rewilding and the benefits it may bring without
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unmaking landscapes in which centuries of human work and human

history have created conditions worth preserving for both ecological
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and cultural reasons?

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That is the question that animates Sarah Hamilton’s rich environ-

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mental history of the Albufera de Valencia, Cultivating Nature: The

­Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape. The Albufera, a freshwa-
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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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fields, forests, and beaches that surround it as the Albufera Natural

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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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tested agriculture’s growing monopolization of the lake. Yet even as the

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Albufera became more humanized, the novel ecosystems that resulted

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remained highly productive. As the Albufera entered the twentieth

century, its competing roles as a place of rice culture, a source of abun-
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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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For Sarah Hamilton, the Albufera is a microcosm, a little world unto

itself that speaks to a larger history. A stellar example of the promises
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and perils of nonwilderness conservation and a compelling foil to the

politics of rewilding, the Albufera also turns out to be a central place
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in modern Spanish environmental thought and politics. In the first part

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of the twentieth century, as Spanish reformers turned to environmental

manipulation as a path toward national modernization, farmers and
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landowners sought to increase the Albufera’s agricultural productivity

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even as urban romantics gained a new appreciation of its natural beauty

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and peasant traditions. The resulting conservation campaign, in which

urbanites sought to protect what remained of the lake as public prop-
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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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ticized. Indeed, this campaign initiated a century-long dynamic of

tension between urban and rural Valencians.
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Such conflicts were common to the environmental politics of mod-

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ern nations in the early twentieth century, as state-sanctioned conser-

vation regimes often clashed with agrarian lifeways. But the Albufera’s
fate—and, for that matter, the trajectory of Spanish environmental
politics—took a dramatic turn when Francisco Franco’s military dicta-
torship took control in 1939. Initially, natural scientists gained modest

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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become a flash point for the formation of a distinctive Spanish environ-

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mental movement that, as Hamilton puts it, mixed “concern for natural
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systems, demands for urban quality of life, a new sense of Valencian

identity, and resistance to the regime.”
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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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European Community. The Albufera assumed a place of European envi-

ronmental importance, a status that highlighted its role in protecting
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biodiversity in relation to other important European natural areas.

But continental environmental visions could not quite capture the
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cultural importance of the place, either in terms of its deep local his-
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tory of human management or in terms of its unique role as the crucible

of a socially conscious brand of urban environmental politics. The
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Albufera’s designation as a natural park did make a place for activities

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such as rice growing, but only by imposing the straitjacket of tradition-

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alism, or “enforced primitivism,” on rice producers. While it might

seem that the creation of the Albufera Natural Park, and its recognition
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as an ecosystem of global significance, was a triumph for cultural and

environmental protection, in fact the scaling-up of the Albufera’s envi-
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ronmental politics produced profound local and regional environmen-

tal problems. As Hamilton brilliantly shows, the years immediately
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after its preservation as a park were actually a nadir for the Albufera’s
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social and biological conditions, with rice growers in open rebellion

against the conservation regime and the lake in a state of ecological
deterioration. Park preservation initially came at the cost of alienating
the landscape’s most consequential stewards.
Just when things seemed darkest for the Albufera, several hopeful
developments altered its trajectory yet again. Declining water quality

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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provide important lessons for collaborative conservation management

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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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has operated. There is nothing normatively natural about the Albufera,

no aboriginal wildness to which it might return if left alone. Removing
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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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of active human management. That is one basic conservation lesson

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of the Albufera’s environmental history. Another lesson, more diffi-

cult to stomach, is that there may be no single management 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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of ecological uncertainties. Finally, as seductive as the rewilding vision

may be, the history of the Albufera allows us to see that the very forces
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that facilitate rewilding—urbanization, agricultural intensification,

continental economic integration—are also among the gravest threats
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to the ecological and cultural integrity of traditional working land-

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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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My work in the Albufera Natural Park began with a manhole cover.

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Towel in hand, trekking over the dunes on my way to the beach one
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morning, I spotted it nestled among the seagrass, its cast-iron face

stamped with the words “Urbanization of the Devesa, Sanitation, 1971.”
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Unlike the rest of Spain’s Mediterranean coastline, the beaches just

south of Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, remained almost entirely
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undeveloped. But the manhole cover, half-buried by sand, was self-

evidently part of a vast subterranean sanitation system, paralleled
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aboveground by buzzing high-voltage wires, far larger than was war-

ranted by the few buildings that stood along the shoreline. What, I
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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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It quickly became clear that the tranquility of the beaches on the

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Devesa of El Saler and of the adjacent Albufera Lake belied a complex

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and contentious history. My curiosity at the incongruous manhole and

the strange sense of timeless tradition and pristine nature incompletely
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masking a history of profound transformation grew into a study of the

ecological and cultural evolution of this space, which remains an
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on­going site of contention between factions of Valencian society. I

tiptoed through bird sanctuaries with park managers, visited rice fields,
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warehouses, and paella restaurants with farmers, crossed the lake’s

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murky waters in noisy diesel-powered boats with fishermen and ecolo-

gists, and unearthed dusty notebooks from the personal files of journal-
ists and politicians. The men and women with whom I spoke lent not
merely depth and nuance to archival and published materials, but at
times entirely new and unexpected interpretations of the past. I thank
all of these collaborators for sharing their memories, their knowledge,

xv
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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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many days providing me with science lessons, personal insights, docu-

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ments, and behind-the-scenes tours in the fields, waters, and forests of

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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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vided materials related to this project and whose suggestions opened

unsuspected avenues of investigation, and especially to Ricardo Mar-
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tínez at the Servicio de Planeamiento del Ayuntamiento de Valencia for

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his enthusiasm and labors on my behalf.

I have used some Valencian place names and terminology in defer-
ence to the preferences of my informants, and to emphasize that the
story contained in these pages is deeply rooted in a specific place with
a unique regional and national history. Thus, I refer to the Castilian
Ribera Baja and Huerta agricultural regions as the Ribera Baixa and

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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Paco Sánchez, and Lino Camprubí contributed expertise and insight

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and helped me work through theoretical and source-based quandaries.

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The mavens of the Women’s Environmental History Network, espe-

cially Sara(h)s Elkind, Gregg, and Pritchard, provided inspiration and
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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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sity of Washington Press, greatly improved the finished product. I am

grateful to Lisa Brady and two anonymous reviewers from Environmen-
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tal History for their thoughtful comments on my analysis of Spanish

envi­ronmental movements during the Franco era. Portions of that anal­
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ysis, which appears in revised and expanded form in this book, were
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published as “Environmental Change and Protest in Franco’s Spain,

1939–1975,” Environmental History 22 (2017): 257–81 and as “Activis­mo
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Medioambiental en la Época Tardofranquista: El caso de El Saler,” Arbor

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192, no. 781 (Sept.–Oct. 2016): a346. Funding from the Fulbright Com-
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mission; Rackham Graduate School, the Eisenberg Institute for His-

torical Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the International
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Institute at the University of Michigan; and the Department of History

and the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University supported me
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during my visits to Spain and the process of writing and revision that
followed.
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I extend a special thanks to my friends at the University of Michi-

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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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ADENA Asociación para la Defensa de la Naturaleza, National

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Association for the Defense of Nature

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AEA Acció Ecologista–Agró, Environmental Action-Heron

AEORMA Asociación Española para la Ordenación del Medio
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Ambiente, Spanish Association for Environmental

Planning
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AEP agri-environmental program

AVA Asociación Valenciana de Agricultores, Valencian
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Farmers’ Association
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
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CA comunidad autónoma, autonomous community

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CHJ Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar, Júcar Hydro-

graphic Confederation
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CSIC Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,

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National Research Council

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EEC European Economic Community (after 1993, European

Community; after 2009, European Union)
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GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

ICONA Instituto para la Conservación de la Naturaleza,
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Nature Conservation Institute

ILE Institución Libre de Enseñanza, Free Educational
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Institute
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JAE Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones

Científicas, Board for Advanced Studies and Scientific
Research
LIFE L’Instrument Financier pour l’Environnement, Finan-
cial Instrument for the Environment

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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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—Va l enci a n h istor i a n M igu el Gua l Ca m a r ena, 1979

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Traffic is heavy on the coastal road south of Valencia on

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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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city residents and foreign tourists bake under clear Mediterranean

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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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ings loom incongruously above a forest of Aleppo pines, while terns

and gulls wheel overhead. The tranquility is a far cry from the densely
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developed beaches elsewhere along the Spanish coast and provides a

welcome break from the noise and dust of the city.
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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

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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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according to a confluence of cultural, economic, and physical factors.

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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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Valencian creation, born in the paddies surrounding the Albufera. At

the turn of the twentieth century, in an era when upper-class Europeans
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universally preferred French cuisine to the relatively humble peasant

dishes native to Spain, food writer Emilia Pardo Bazán noted that
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Valencian rice was one of vanishingly few “triumphs of Spanish cuisine

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over foreign,” and her contemporary Post-Thebussem singled out paella

as “a national glory” amid a sea of regionally specific fare.1 Decades later,
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polymath Gregorio Marañon wrote that paella “reigns, in glittering and

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varied glory,” over Spanish cuisine as a whole and had done so “without
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faltering throughout the centuries.”2 Today, El Palmar alone, with a

resident population of eight hundred, operates more than three dozen
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restaurants specializing in local rice, many of them clustered around

the small plaza mayor (main square), and hundreds more can be found
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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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liquid without bursting and is virtually impossible to overcook. Descrip-

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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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tweeted one outraged reader. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”5

Others claimed Oliver’s bastardization was equivalent to making fish
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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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around a steaming tray, forks in hand; “paella is culture and tradition.”7

In recent years the European Union gave this conviction institu-
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tional support. Three local varieties of rice (Bomba, Senia, and Albu­
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fera) have Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, a label

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intended to give a competitive advantage to “farmers and producers

who have kept traditions alive.”8 The traditions associated with such
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products, however, are not as clear-cut as this definition would imply.

The Valencian Institute of Agrarian Studies developed the Albufera
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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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A group of rural Valencians gathered to enjoy a paella, from a series of postcards

on Valencian traditions, ca. 1905. Author’s collection
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to carry them on outings on the lake follow in the footsteps of urban

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Valencians who have used the lake as an escape from the city for more
as

than three centuries. The vast numbers of ducks, swamphens, and

other waterfowl that shelter amid the reeds and the rice have attracted
hi

hunters for longer still and today make Valencia a major destination for
n

ornithologists and nature lovers around the world. Members of the El

gt

Palmar fishing community, which traces its origins to the thirteenth-

century Reconquest, carry out their work in motorized skiffs, but they
on

also hold periodic races and heritage exhibitions with shallow-drafted

lateen-sailed boats. Anywhere in Spain, the image of a brilliant sunset
Pr

reflected in still waters, interrupted by silhouetted eel nets, is immedi-

ately identifiable with the Albufera and with Valencia.
es

Internationally, the lake and its surroundings are renowned as one

s

of the most significant ecological spaces on the Iberian Peninsula. On

the Albufera’s eastern edge, irises, reeds, and other riparian flora give
way to a forest, dark and silent, dominated by the Aleppo pines. Beneath
the trees, the sandy earth is held in place with a mix of low vegetation
and trees including juniper, dwarf fan palms, oaks, and myrtle. Closer
to the Mediterranean coast lie slightly depressed, seasonally flooded

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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open, parklike forests used to graze livestock, but in the Valencian

ni

Devesa, wildlife and tourists have replaced the cattle that roamed there
ve

in past centuries. As they have for millennia, tens of thousands of birds

feed, nest, and rest in the Devesa, the lake, and the rice fields each year,
rs

many of them seasonal visitors from Africa or northern Europe.

Those birds have drawn people to the Albufera for millennia, long
ity

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
of

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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they called Valentia, adjacent to what Pliny described as a “delightful

as

expanse of a lake.”9 According to Strabo, at the time of Roman settle-

ment the Albufera was a thirty-thousand-hectare “lagoon of salt water.”10
hi

A natural channel through the Devesa, called a gola, ­connected the lake
n

to the sea and allowed water to flow both ways, while springs of mineral-
gt

rich freshwater from subterranean aquifers and runoff from a vast catch-
ment area slightly diluted the salty water of the lake. Over the years,
on

sediments built up on the lake floor, gradually reducing the Albufera’s

depth and circumference even as it nourished a thriving underwater
Pr

prairie of rooted vegetation. More than thirty kinds of fish, from the
tiny autoch­thonous toothcarp known as samaruc and fartet to massive
es

sea bass that wandered in through the gola, swam through the briny
s

waters, dining on a rich mix of invertebrates, plants, and plankton.

Oysters formed vast, crusty beds and provided sustenance not only to
birds and fish but to the growing human population nearby.
Small-scale exploitation of the Albufera’s natural resources, from
fish and birds to firewood and palms, continued largely unchanged for
centuries, despite political and social upheavals in the nearby city.

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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livestock to graze in the forest. When Jaume I of Aragon definitively

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conquered the Taifa in 1238, he promptly claimed the lake and its forest
ve

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
rs

it gained control over Aragonese territories in 1469 and has remained

a prized destination for hunters and pleasure-seekers ever since.
ity

In the lands surrounding the lake, Jaume the Conqueror distributed

estates to his followers and established the Kingdom of Valencia, one
of

of three largely autonomous kingdoms that made up the Crown of

Aragon. Jaume distributed the best lands of his new territory, closest
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to the coast and the city, among his fellow Catalan-speakers, but most
as

of the new settlers in the drier lands of the interior were Castilian-
speaking Aragonese. As a result the kingdom possessed a cultural
hi

Catalan-Aragonese duality in which a minority of disproportionately

n

influential residents identified with Catalan traditions and language

gt

over the Castilian ones that predominated across most of the Iberian
peninsula.12 Over the centuries, local vocabulary and pronunciation
on

in the Catalan-speaking regions altered subtly, giving rise to what the

Valencian Language Academy today recognizes as a Valencian dialect.
Pr

In all essential respects, Valencian is the same as the Catalan spoken

in Barcelona, but approximately half the area’s modern population
es

con­siders it to be a separate language. This belief is tied to political

s

views about Valencia’s position within the Spanish state: contesting

factions insist upon Valencia’s essential independence, its intrinsic ties
to other Catalan-speaking lands, and its fundamental unity with the
Spanish (Castilian) nation, respectively.13 Notions of a distinct Valen-
cian identity are strongest in and around the city, corresponding to the
area in which the Valencian language is most frequently spoken.

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
U

grants into a patchwork of small farms, many of them owner-operated,

ni

which remained viable despite their small size because of the increased
ve

productivity made possible by irrigation. Together with peasants and

tenant farmers, these estates produced modest harvests for local con-
rs

sumption until the sixteenth century, when previously self-sufficient

agricultural regions all along the Mediterranean coast began to concen-
ity

trate their efforts on mulberry cultivation to meet the growing market

for silk. The city itself become a center for the silk trade. Landowners
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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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export markets born of the growing agricultural specialization. Both

as

silk cultivation and agricultural intensification required radically more

water than traditional cultivation, and the Spanish Crown cofinanced
hi

large-scale hydraulic projects around Valencia in order to irrigate new

n

orchards and gardens.

gt

Although this shift led to dramatic changes all along the coast, some
of the most significant occurred along the lower Júcar River, or Ribera
on

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
es

water and eventually poured into the sea through the gola. Like the
s

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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Map 2. The Valencian Community. Inset shows Valencia’s location within

the Iberian Peninsula. Map by author
 The prolific fields of Valencia astonished visitors accustomed to the
barren steppes and underemployed workforce of the Spanish interior.
Spanish botanist José Cavanilles, who wrote a classic taxonomic study
of the region, recounted descending from the western mountains into
the cultivated coastal plains, where “one observes gently meandering
rivers, . . . a thousand irrigation canals in all directions, the Valencians’
indefatigable industry, the multitude of trees and productive lands, all
objects that force one to suspend one’s examination of the natural fea-
tures to admire those of artistry.”15 In 1773 the traveling Englishman
U

Richard Twiss proclaimed the lands surrounding the city “one of the
ni

most fertile countries in Europe, the kingdom of Naples not excepted.”

ve

He correctly attributed this condition to a combination of natural

advantages and hard labor: it was the ubiquitous canals, he wrote, that
rs

“render these plantations so uncommonly fertile” despite the fact that

“it had not rained in some months.”16 Foreigners routinely commented
ity

on the industriousness of Valencian farmers. “No one, who has seen

the Spaniards on the sea-coast, can think them lazy,” wrote one traveler.
of

“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-
as

tivation of their lands,” agreed another, a decade later; “The bounty

of nature seems to have joined with the industry of the inhabitants to
hi

render this valley agreeable.” Across the continent, such reports gave
n

rise to a heavily romanticized image of Valencia as a land of hardwork-

gt

ing, contented peasants, prosperous landowners and merchants, and

extraordinarily fruitful fields.
on

Even as it made Valencia famous, the expansion of irrigated agricul-

ture fundamentally altered the ecosystems of the Albufera and the
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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
es

water, and so many reeds that you can sail upon it only with difficulty,
s

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-
U

cided with the emergence of Enlightenment rationality and interest

ni

in scientific land management among certain sectors, causing some

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forward-thinking entrepreneurs to look again at such marginal lands

as those on the banks of the Albufera. Rice cultivation allowed ambi-
rs

tious farmers to produce thousands of kilos of grain on a single hectare

of waterlogged, previously unproductive land, and rising prices encour-
ity

aged reclamation efforts on the banks of the Albufera. Landowners

commissioned peasants to build low earthen dikes around small plots
of

at the water’s edge; these plots became known as tancats—a Valencian

term that translates literally as “enclosures.” When connected to irriga-
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tion canals and regulated by simple sluices, gravity carried water into
as

the tancats and eventually out again, into the lake, at the proper point
in the rice’s growing cycle. Technically, as these enclosures reclaimed
hi

land that had previously lain below the waterline, the tancats infringed
n

on the Crown’s property, but in light of their clear economic benefits

gt

there was little risk of official sanction. For the same reasons, as tancat
construction progressed concentrically toward the center of the lake
on

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
es

preferential activity in the Albufera and its surroundings and formally

s

surveying the lake’s perimeter in order to facilitate the sale of “uncul-

tivated land” lying beneath the surface.19
As production rose, rice became an important part of local diets
and culture. Valencians believed “that nobody knows how to cook rice
better or in more ways, and it is true that they must be given preference,”
noted one food writer in 1818; their rice dishes had “achieved a degree

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
ity

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,
of

courtesy of the Archivo del Museo Naval, Ministerio de Defensa de España,

E_48_04
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as

of perfection unknown in other provinces,” owing to the fact that rice

was “almost the only food that maintains them.”20 To promote con­
hi

tinued reclamation, the Crown approved and financed an extension of

n

the Royal Júcar Canal in the early nineteenth century, diverting almost
gt

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
on

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
Pr

the lake, flood their fields, and prevent sea water from washing in and
killing their crops. Fishermen responded to this interruption of fish
es

migration patterns by furtively undermining the makeshift dam until

s

it collapsed, allowing lake levels to decline.21 After a series of passionate

and sometimes violent confrontations between the two groups, in 1856
the landowners won the legal right to control the lake’s levels and fitted
the gola with a permanent sluice gate. By the end of the century they had
added a second canal, the Gola del Perellonet, also controlled with metal
gates; a third, the Gola del Pujol, would be built in the mid-twentieth

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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From November to February, the landowners shut the golas again

ni

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
rs

and walls separating each tancat from its neighbors, allowing laborers
to reach every part of the fields by boat. They used this opportunity to
ity

repair walls, fill in depressions, and otherwise maintain the land. The
water brought in fresh nutrients and washed away mineral accumula-
of

tions that had built up over the previous season, thereby improving the
soil for the following season’s crop.
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The perellonà served a recreational purpose as well, providing a

as

lucrative secondary source of income for landowners who sold permits

to hunt on their lands and for fishermen who offered their services as
hi

ferrymen and guides to wealthy sportsmen. The Albufera lies on the

n

western Mediterranean flyway, the primary bird migration corridor

gt

between Europe and Africa. For millennia, millions of birds arrived in

the Albufera each winter, feeding in the lake and resting on their long
on

journey south. Although the natural wetlands were much reduced by

the nineteenth century, the birds arrived all the same, settling in the
Pr

standing water of the perellonà in droves. Vast numbers from more

than three hundred species of ducks, gulls, waders, and songbirds
es

gobbled down loose grains of rice along with the insects, amphibians,
s

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
hi

and other gamebirds. Rafael Monleón, “Vista general de la Albufera, tomada

desde la orilla de la Dehesa en un dia de tirada pública,” La Ilustración Española
n

y Americana 19, no. 44 (Nov. 30, 1875): 348. Image from Google Books
gt
on

In the process of creating agricultural abundance, urban wealth, and

gastronomic delights, farmers had fundamentally altered the Romans’
Pr

“delightful lake.” Yet the new Albufera had its own beauty, its own rich
ecosystems, and its own cultural importance. Many of the animals that
es

had once populated the natural wetlands moved into the artificial ones
s

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
U

and complicated history, the bird enthusiasts, gastronomes, and sun-

ni

worshippers who visit the Albufera today encounter a landscape that

ve

appears untouched by time. A handful of aging fishermen still set out

each morning, casting their nets for eels, tench, and mullet to sell in
rs

Valencia’s markets, while scavenging birds flock around rice farmers as

they till the wet soils of their fields. The lake and its environs still host
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one of the largest and most diverse populations of migratory birds in

all of Europe, a fact that resulted in the declaration of the entire area—
of

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,
W

the soft undulations of the dunes, and the perfect calm of the lake offer
as

little evidence of the transformations they have undergone.

Only a few discordant details hint at a more complicated past: the
hi

scattered high-rises along the Devesa, the faded remnants of roads and
n

foundations, now largely buried beneath encroaching vegetation, the

gt

invasive Asian carp and American crabs fishermen pull from the murky
lake. Timeless and traditional though it might appear, the Albufera is
on

deeply embedded in global and national currents. Definitions of moder-

nity and Valencian nationalism are continually forged amid the green-
Pr

brown waters, the sun-baked beaches, and the waving fields of grain.
Farmers, politicians, urban families, and scientists assert competing
es

legal and moral claims over the space. Residents and visitors alike
s

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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Midway through a trans-Pyrenean trek in 2005, I entered my first Span-

ish national park and, turning a corner, came face-to-face with a large
rs

dun-colored cow, placidly flicking her ears at me from a thicket of wild

azaleas. My surprise at the unexpected encounter was immediately fol-
ity

lowed with consternation that free-range grazing was permitted in

this apparently pristine alpine environment. Decades of hiking in the
of

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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I had assumed similar or even stricter standards would be in effect in

as

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
hi

spaces. Whole villages are situated within the country’s fifteen national
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parks, complete with restaurants, roads, shops, and thriving hotels

gt

catering to seasonal tourist traffic. Residents farm, gather wood, forage

for wild mushrooms, sell beer and snacks at trailheads, and run guided
on

trips into and through the parks. Their fields, walls, fences, homes, and
domestic animals provide picturesque bucolic vignettes within the
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natural splendor of snow-capped peaks and abundant wildflowers.

In regionally managed natural parks (parques naturales), which out-
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number national parks in Spain by a margin of nearly nine to one, mod-

s

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
ni

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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multiple uses engendered a series of conflicts throughout the twentieth

century as various sectors of Valencian society struggled for control
of

over the space.

The Albufera is one of hundreds of sites around the world where
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environmental conservation has threatened the communities whose

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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
hi

human rights activists have drawn attention to the forced eviction of

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native people from their traditional lands, primarily but not exclusively
gt

in settler societies, in the interest of creating human-free landscapes.26

More commonly, however, cultural or historical artifacts of human
on

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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Atlantic targeted landscapes with a visible or well-known human past

to which cultural meanings were attached, from castles and battlefields
es

to gardens and farms.27 Aldo Leopold, perhaps the most influential

s

environmental writer of the twentieth century, is best known for his

work on wilderness but based much of his thinking about ecosystem
value and environmental integrity on his work in extensive agricultural
landscapes in the United States.28 European nature protection regimes,
even more than American ones, are broadly united by the French con-
cept of patrimoine, in which both the cultural and natural elements of

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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“garden of Spain,” ideas of nature are centered in flooded rice fields,

ni

lush vegetable gardens, and fragrant orange groves.29

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Conservation biologists refer to such spaces as “working land-

scapes.” Within them, active economic exploitation coexists with
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healthy ecosystems. In Europe, where millennia of agriculture and live-

stock grazing by dense human populations has reshaped the country-
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side, working landscapes are particularly crucial to biodiversity. While

some European species vanished or retreated to less-disturbed environ-
of

ments as human populations expanded, many others adapted to the

new conditions and formed altered but rich biotic communities that
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not only tolerated but relied upon ongoing human actions. They thrive
as

in extensively managed gardens, farms, orchards, pastures, and forests

alongside the human communities that sustain them. Rural people
hi

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

where natural hydrologic systems have deteriorated. Recent research

around the world has explored patterns of such anthropogenic “posi-
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tive disturbances,” in which traditional uses and exploitation of local

resources have created islands of biodiversity and ecosystem health
es

amid relatively barren spontaneous landscapes.30 It is these hybrid

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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-
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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

as exemplars of cultural traditions and national heritage but sharply

criticized when their actions diverge from the roles into which they
rs

have been forced. Tracey Heatherington has accordingly described

European parks as places of display where a certain narrative of the
ity

national past is shaped, projecting a sense to visitors that the lands

and the people within them have remained largely unchanged over the
of

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
W

in a way that makes it impossible for them to continue to live on their

as

traditional lands.33
During the 1980s, shortly after the declaration of the Albufera Natu-
hi

ral Park, representatives of the Valencian Farmers’ Association (Aso-

n

ciación Valenciana de Agricultores, or AVA) insisted that rice farmers

gt

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

seen environmentalism as an enemy,” declared one, in the midst of mas-

sive protests against the park, “it is because the attitude of [urban con-
Pr

servationists] has forced us to present it that way.”34 Such claims echoed

those of other conservation refugees around the world: some two
es

decades later, Maasai leader Martin Saning’o addressed members of the

s

International Union for the Conservation of Nature in almost identical

language, decrying legislation that had barred his people from their
traditional grazing lands and insisting that “we were the original conser­
vationists. Now you have made us enemies of conservation.”35 Despite
widely disparate geographical and cultural contexts, Valencian rice

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
U

affect has actually accelerated environmental degradation through a

ni

process of land abandonment and the corresponding losses of cul-

ve

tural and biological heritage.36 In some cases, this demographic shift left
room for the spontaneous regeneration of species that had been driven
rs

out decades or centuries before. More commonly, however, the aban-

donment of agricultural lands has resulted not in the resurgence of
ity

native biota but in the collapse of healthy human-dependent ecosys-

tems and the takeover of an impoverished subset of flora and fauna.
of

The arid Mediterranean region in particular is prone to the explosive

growth of homogeneous, highly flammable expanses of brush, while
W

canals and rice fields simply vanish beneath siltation and fast-growing
as

weeds when not continually maintained.37 Such degradation is par-

ticularly worrisome in light of recent studies suggesting that nearly
hi

half of Europe’s agricultural land likely to be abandoned in the com-

n

ing years is within a five-kilometer radius of high-value natural sites,

gt

with highly unpredictable but almost certainly negative results for

biodiversity levels and ecosystem stability across the continent.38
on

Along with ecological decline, the crisis of European farming directly

impacts the survival of prized cultural practices and symbols, including
Pr

those picturesque vignettes that entrance visitors and provide a sense

of national identity to millions of Europeans.
es

This book explores some of the ways that conservationists, scien-

s

tists, politicians, tourists, and farmers in twentieth-century Valencia

struggled to strike a balance between conflicting interpretations of
ecology and tradition, eventually reaching a grudging but generally
stable truce over the management of one of Spain’s most significant
ecosystems. Mixed-use landscapes such as the Albufera are critical to
identity and cultural heritage in Europe, and efforts to preserve them

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
U

economies, and environmental protection. The story of the Albufera

ni

reveals unexpected parallels between the modern history of Spain,

ve

widely considered an outlier within Western Europe, and that of its

neighbors. The top-down perspective of diplomatic and economic his-
rs

tory, stressing treaties, gross national product, and foreign aid packages,
simultaneously positions Spain as a poor relation to its European neigh-
ity

bors and obscures more pervasive symmetries between everyday life in

modern Spain and elsewhere in the Western world.39 In the twentieth
of

century alone, Spain’s abstention from both World Wars, its exclusion
from postwar economic and diplomatic collaborations, and the tenacity
W

of Francisco Franco’s right-wing dictatorship well into the 1970s seemed

as

to set it outside of the “normal” path of European history.

An environmental perspective on modern Spanish history, however,
hi

reveals striking similarities with other industrialized states. In Spain, as

n

elsewhere in Europe, nature-loving societies, hiking clubs, and an orga-

gt

nized national parks system grew out of fin-de-siècle currents of roman-

tic nationalism, even as the state embarked on a campaign of industrial
on

intensification that physically transformed the landscape. In the postwar

era, growing awareness of the damage to human and environmental
Pr

health wrought in the name of progress spurred natural scientists and

other concerned citizens to push the government for reforms, gathering
es

popular support for expanded protections of ecologically valuable or

s

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
U

realities, meanwhile, highlights the continuing importance of local

ni

specificity in the study of environmental problems. It is to some extent

ve

the very uniqueness of the Spanish experience of modernity that makes

the Albufera much more than a case study of European environmental
rs

conservation. Rather, Spain’s contemporary history is one of immensely

complex regional relationships, distinctively Mediterranean physical
ity

con­ditions, and a deeply conflicted relationship with the European core.

The Albufera’s transformations from fishing ground to rice paddy and
of

from tourist resort to wildlife refuge were rooted not only in Spanish
and Valencian trends but also in transnational currents of culture, poli-
W

tics, and economics. This study thus walks a fine line between high-
as

lighting the ways in which Spain forms a part of European and

transnational narratives and the ways in which it diverges from those
hi

narratives. The Albufera’s history, like the histories of other contested

n

landscapes across Europe, must be understood as a product of the con-

gt

fluence of multiple scales ranging from interpersonal interactions to

transnational politics.
on

My research for this project sought to identify and synthesize con-

tending narratives of the Albufera’s history, lodged in a variety of
Pr

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

and explanations for the frequently contradictory reports found in offi-

cial archives and press clippings. Members of the press were themselves
at the forefront of the environmental campaign described in chapter 3,
for instance, and the articles they published offer a very different pic-
ture of events than the one they described in interviews some forty

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
U

relied on such first-person narratives as a means of understanding the

ni

diversity of experiences in the events I depict.

ve

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

of Queen Isabel II in 1868 and the declaration of the short-lived Spanish

Republic in early 1873 marked the transfer of all royal properties, includ-
of

ing the Albufera and Devesa, to the state. The forty years that followed
encompassed the most radical period of land transformation in the
W

Albufera’s history, as tancats enclosed nearly two-thirds of the remain-

as

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

try’s institutions strenuously resisted change. Essayists, politicians, and

gt

philosophers across the political spectrum roundly condemned the

deeply corrupt political system and called for the reinvention and
on

reconstruction of the Spanish nation, in large part through modern-

izing educational reforms. For many cultural elites, the country’s
Pr

diverse regional traditions were key to that nation’s character; among

those traditions was a romanticized vision of the Valencian countryside
es

based on the agricultural prosperity and harmonious social relations

s

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
U

civil war in 1936, and the dictatorship that followed applied the full
ni

technical and financial resources of the state to the project of physically

ve

remaking the country. Under Franco’s leadership, hydraulic construc-

tion, reforestation, and industrial and agricultural intensification cre-
rs

ated massive demographic and economic upheaval. The hard-won city

park of the Albufera and the Devesa, along with much of Spain’s other
ity

undeveloped land, faced existential threats from rapid, largely unreg­

ulated industrial, urban, and agricultural expansion. Supported by
of

the regime, city boosters moved forward with a plan to privatize and
develop the Devesa despite objections from local scientists. There and
W

elsewhere in the national territory, scientific conservationists were

as

among the few able to oppose the authoritarian state’s developmentalist

agenda with relative impunity, wielding a combination of claims based
hi

on expertise, patriotism, and Spain’s inter­national reputation to achieve

n

limited conservation goals. Chapter 2 traces the changes in the Spanish

gt

countryside and the conservationist groundwork laid by those scientists

over the course of the dictatorship.
on

In the early 1970s, as the Devesa development progressed, the Albu­

fera was the site of Spain’s first environmental movement. A loose coali-
Pr

tion of Valencian working-class residents, journalists, and professionals

merged scientific expertise and progressive social politics with new
es

forms of regional identity that placed the defense of local landscapes at

s

the heart of anti-Franco activism. Their campaign, known as “El Saler

for the People,” was a manifestation of the ways in which urban progres-
sives and intellectuals began to redefine notions of natural patrimony
and to stake their own claims to ownership and usufruct of public
spaces. As described in chapter 3, the El Saler movement reveals the
complex dynamics of late-Franco politics, in which environmental

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

norms. Chapter 4 shows how this process contributed to the declara-

ve

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

over land and a redefinition of Valencian nationalism that turned away

from its agrarian past and toward an urban, cosmopolitan future. This
of

reorientation left the rice-farming families whose lands lay within the
boundaries of the new park, already under pressure from integration
W

with global markets, in a precarious position. As it had during the city’s

as

purchase of the park some sixty years earlier, public interest in protect-
ing a symbolic landscape trumped farmers’ claims of individual rights.
hi

Chapter 5 explores the crisis and compromise of the 1990s, as rice

n

farmers’ economic situation grew increasingly untenable and the

gt

park’s ecological value declined despite its legal protections as a result

of ongoing land use changes across the Valencian Community. While
on

con­servationists continued to decry the farmers’ actions as contribut-

ing to the degradation of the ecosystem and farmers angrily protested
Pr

against the curtailment of their property rights, the two groups to

some extent shared common interests in the Albufera’s survival. An
es

unlikely collaboration between a charismatic rice farmer and the park’s

s

energetic new director brought these divergent groups together. As

implemented through their efforts, the reform of the EEC’s Common
Agricultural Policy offered both economic and ideological incentives
for farmers to find a place for themselves in the new Valencian identity
as “conservationists with common sense.”40 This successful—albeit
not unproblematic—initiative suggests methods that can be more

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
U

establishment of human-free, postagricultural landscapes—as a

ni

viable and productive alternative to long-term farm subsidies. In the

ve

conclusion, I explore some of the ongoing complications with rewild-

ing and restoration as they relate to working landscapes such as the
rs

Albufera, in which productive agriculture continues to play a pivotal

and highly visible role. Despite ongoing tensions and disputes, the
ity

Albufera is an example of how farmers can, and should, be produc-

tively enlisted in the pursuit of noneconomic objectives that benefit
of

both rural and urban populations.

W
as
hi
n gt
on
Pr
es
s

28 | introduction