La cultura de la supervivenciacarencias y excesos hídricos en la Huerta de Alicante (ss. XVI-XVIII)

Abstract

Culture of survival: water shortage and excess in the Huerta of Alicante (XVI-XVIII centuries). The Huerta of Alicante was along the Modern Age, one of the most interesting irrigated dryland in the Eastern Iberian Peninsula. The secular water deficit led to an irrigation system based on a strict schedule computation and the construction of dams to hold and divert the water generated by the extraordinary autumn rainfall. The modelic Tibi's reservoir built (1579-1594) in the Montnegre river is an excellent example of the pressing need to store water to irrigate the fields at key periods of the agricultural cycle, but also an expression of the desire to avoid the flows produced by the intense storms of autumn were lost at the sea. Tibi's reservoir and dams of Mutxamel, Sant Joan and El Campello -raised downstream-, composed a unique hydraulic system systematically subjected to the vagaries of the weather. The droughts and hydrometeorological excesses experienced during the Modern Age contributed to create a unique "water culture" in which technics, institutional control and popular religiosity shook hands and helped to the configuration of a poor irrigated landscape of enormous interest, wich has been in force until by the last decades of the last century.