3 - The decline of agriculture

Summary

To outsiders the kingdom of Valencia appeared to be a green and prosperous land, perhaps – together with the valley of the Guadalquivir – one of the most flourishing agricultural areas in the peninsula. ‘One of nature's orchards’, Méndez Silva described it in 1645, ‘blessed with a soft climate and the fairest and gentlest landscape in all Spain, and covered with gardens, plantations, shady arbours and villas, which echo to the babble of canals, fountains and streams.’ But the Valencians themselves were not so sure. Most of the territory, they had to remind Olivares once, was ‘rough mountain and waste’. The land of Valencia, in fact, offers great contrasts, above all between the irrigated huertas, where much of the intensive agriculture is and was carried on, and the dry secano. In a region where the annual rainfall is 17 inches and the summers are cloudless, access to water has meant the difference between life and death. ‘Everybody who sowed this year in the waste lands of Segorbe has given his oath that no wheat or other grain could be harvested’: thus the report of the authorities on the drought of 1613. ‘In the secano this year’, declared the bailiff of Caudete in 1638, ‘not a single crop could be saved.’ The fierce sun and the lack of rain could shrivel the grain which the peasants needed in order to survive.