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FOOD AND DRINK

Why does Valencia have so many blooming oranges?

Valencia has long been associated with the sweet orange fruit and there is even a type of orange that is named after the region. So why does the Spanish city have 12,000 orange trees and what's the history behind it all?

Published: 22 February 2023 10:02 CET
Updated: 15 March 2024 10:43 CET
Why does Valencia have so many blooming oranges?
Why does Valencia have so many oranges? Photo: Ilya P / Unsplash

Visit Valencia today and you’ll see that oranges are everywhere, decorating the façade of the old train station, orange trees line the city streets, and naranjas (oranges in Spanish) are even used in Valencia’s famous cocktail – agua de Valencia. 

In order to understand how Valencia became so entwined with oranges you have to trace the history of the fruit all the way back to ancient China.

According to food historians, they were created by crossing an early mandarin relative with a pomelo. The result was so successful that the fruit soon spread into southeast Asia, India and then the Middle East, where they caught the attention of the Moors.

READ ALSO: ‘What did the Moors ever do for us?’ How Spain was shaped by Muslim rule

There is evidence as far back as the 5th century AD of oranges arriving from north Africa. However, it is thought that they became commonplace in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Caliphate of Córdoba, which started in 929.

At first, the orange tree was used for ornamental purposes, to decorate patios such as the Córdoba Mosque and later the Patios de la Lonja in Valencia.

These oranges were not the type we know and eat today, they were very bitter and were often used as a condiment, for cleaning and preparing pork, and even for polishing copper and brass.  

These are still the similar type of orange that you see lining the streets of Valencia today, but these are not the ones that you eat or drink the juice from, these are either used for decoration or exported to places like the UK to be made into marmalade. 

READ ALSO: Seville brings back tradition of gifting Queen of England marmalade

While this explains how the bitter Seville orange arrived in Spain, there are two theories as to how the sweet variety we associate with Valencia came here.

“Orange buyers in Córdoba”, painting by Ángel Díaz Huertas (1902).
 

One suggests that it was when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed to India in 1497 and Portugal became the main exporter of the sweet oranges from this part of Asia.

Another theory is that Genoa in Italy maintained trading routes with the East because of its importance in the silk industry at the beginning of the 15th century and sweet oranges were imported this way instead.  

Whichever theory is correct, the first shipments of sweet oranges to be exported came from Lisbon, which at the time was the centre of all orange groves in Europe.

In the beginning, the sweet orange was only intended for the rich and in the middle of the 16th century, its cultivation was introduced in various places in the old Kingdom of Valencia, which included Orihuela, Xàtiva and Alzira, but for a long time, it did not go beyond being a tree planted in gardens and on the edges of fields.

During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the Valencian citrus market was restricted to the region and was only sold seasonally, specifically at Christmas. Two of the main recorded early exports of oranges from Valencia were in 1632 when Xátiva sent around 500 loads of fruit, which included oranges and lemons to the Kingdom of Castille and then in the year 1717, when 68,000 lemons and 18,000 oranges were sent from Sagunt to Holland. Despite this, rice and silk were still the main exports from Valencia at that time.  

During those early years, it was actually the town of Soller in Mallorca that was a pioneer in exporting these sweet oranges to the south of France and Catalonia. It is said that many of the orange trees from Soller were transferred to Valencia due, mainly, to a plague of diseases, despite the fact that Valencia already had many of these trees of its own. Even though Soller may have exported oranges first, Valencia soon became more well-known for them due to the industrial revolution.  

But this is only half of the story, the other half can be attributed to the true cradle of the orange: the small town of Carcaixent in the Valencia region. Oranges had already been grown in Carcaixent since 1718 by the priest, Vicente Monzó Vidal who planted the first citrus field there. Together with a notary and an apothecary, he created the true Valencian sweet orange by grafting lemon trees with sweet orange trees brought from Murcia.  

Alzira and other municipalities in the region started growing these varieties too and soon orange groves spread along the entire Mediterranean coast.

France was the first foreign country to consume oranges from Carcaixent at the beginning of the 19th century. Soller had been the main exporter to France up until then, but Carcaixent soon took centre stage. In 1848, the Mallorcan businessman José Catalá Broseta, who brought oranges from Soller, set up a business to make orange containers in the old Carcaixent barracks and launched the beginning of what was to be Valencia’s cemented connection with the citric fruit.

Oranges piled up in a warehouse in Carcaixent. Photo: Vicenç Salvador Torres Guerola/Wikipedia

At the time, the main supplier of exports to England was still Portugal, while Valencia occupied a secondary position, its main market being France. It was thanks to Catalá, that the first large-volume export of Valencian oranges took place.

The first important export to England came in 1849 and in 1850 the first export of oranges to Liverpool took place in the Port of Valencia, which highlighted the need for more maritime connections. 

By 1871, 45,764 tonnes of oranges were exported from Valencia, which represented 75 percent of those from all over Spain, while in 1894, 140,000 tonnes were exported and twenty years later, in 1913, the half-a-million mark was reached for the first time.  

The main buyers at the beginning of the century were the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and Valencia became a world leader in all things to do with oranges. 

One more thing – With millions of oranges so readily available in Valencia, you may be wondering if you can just pick one from the trees in the city and eat it up. 

Unfortunately, these bitter oranges are not deemed fit for consumption by Valencian authorities largely due to the city pollution they pick up.

Instead, the 420 tonnes of naranjas bordes that are collected every year in the ingenious way seen in the video above are used primarily as compost, but also in the production of essential oils and herbal teas (mainly the leaves for the latter).

There are simply so many oranges in the city that Valencia’s Town Hall is currently looking for alternative uses for them. If life gives you bitter oranges, what do you do with them?

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SPAIN EXPLAINED

Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Despite a top secret project to build them during the dictatorship, Spaniards have never been keen on the idea of nuclear weapons, especially since the US accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Almería.

Published: 15 April 2024 16:36 CEST
Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Spain isn’t part of the reduced group of nations that have nuclear weapons, which includes European neighbours the UK and France.

It has never tested nuclear weapons, does not manufacture them, nor has it bought them from nuclear allies who make them.

Spain is still a NATO member and doesn’t shy away from involving itself in foreign policy debates, often taking positions against the mainstream.

But it has still never joined the nuclear club nor have Spaniards ever really wanted to, even though former dictator Francisco Franco had different ideas (more on that below).

In fact, Spaniards seem to have an indifferent if not abnormally negative view of nukes, largely stemming from an accident by an American air force on Spanish soil in the 1960s.

READ ALSO: How important is nuclear power to Spain?

A 2018 study on state attitudes towards nuclear weapons concluded that Spain had “little to no interest in nuclear weapons.” Yet Spain still benefits from NATO’s so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ defence and has nearby neighbours, including France and the United Kingdom, that are nuclear powers. It is also home to several American military bases.

In that sense, Spain balances a somewhat unique position of being pro-nuclear for other countries and as a broader defence deterrence at the global level, but not on Spanish territory because it knows that would not sit well with Spaniards.

But why is this? Why doesn’t Spain have nuclear weapons?

Anti-nuclear sentiment among Spaniards

According to an article for Institut Montaigne by Clara Portela, Professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the Spanish people are “sensitised on nuclear weapons, if not negatively disposed towards them.”

Much of it comes down to history and, in particular, an accident involving nuclear weapons on Spanish soil. As part of post-war defence and security agreements Spain made with the U.S, American nuclear weapons were kept on Spanish soil.

Spaniards weren’t keen on the idea. Portela notes that “their presence at the Torrejón base near Madrid was a controversial issue” among the public, but it was an accident in 1966 that really soured Spaniards to nuclear weapons after an American aircraft carrying a hydrogen bomb crashed and dropped the device in the waters near the town of Palomares off the coast of Almería.

READ ALSO: Ten of the best documentaries about Spain

The incident caused “one of the bombs to fall to the seabed and leak radioactivity” into the surrounding area, Portela states, something that would have no doubt hardened many Spaniard’s perceptions towards nuclear weapons, especially as the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still in living memory for many.

A NATO-nuclear referendum

This scepticism towards nuclear arms was solidified twenty years later in a referendum on NATO membership. Though the government of the day campaigned for continued membership of the military alliance, it made it conditional on Spain also continuing as a non-nuclear power. A clause in the referendum consultation outlined this condition: “The prohibition to install, store or introduce nuclear weapons on Spanish soil will be maintained.”

Spaniards backed their continued, non-nuclear NATO membership by 13 percent.

A year later, in 1987, Spain formally signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), further cementing its non-nuclear stance.

And that was it — with this and the result of the referendum, Portela suggests that “the issue of nuclear weapons was all but archived. It hardly re-surfaced in public debates for decades.”

An atomic bomb of the type nicknamed “Little Boy” that was dropped by a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber in 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan. (Photo by LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY / AFP)

The nuclear dictator?

Despite the Spanish public’s distrust of nuclear weapons, there was one Spaniard in particular who was quite keen on the idea: Franco.

In what may be one of the most terrifying historical ‘what ifs’ ever, the fascist dictator wanted to equip Spain with a nuclear arsenal, started a project to do so, and came very close to achieving it.

The ‘Islero Project’, as it was known, was top secret and lasted for several decades of scientific research until it was finally abandoned in the 1980s after his death.

Firstly, a brief consideration of the geopolitics of the time is worthwhile here, and it concerns the Americans again. When the Second World War ended in 1945, Spain immediately became isolated on the international stage owing to its support for Nazi Germany and fascist Spain. It was excluded from the UN and shunned as a real player in international relations.

As the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation grew throughout the 1950s, Franco’s fierce anti-communism combined with the strategic geographical positioning of Spain led the U.S. to form closer ties with the dictatorship, promising financial aid and image rehabilitation in return for allowing American military bases in Spain.

READ ALSO: Where are the US’s military bases in Spain and why are they there?

The Junta de Energía Nuclear was created in 1951, undertaking research and atomic energy development more broadly, and it sent promising researchers to study in the U.S. When they returned, the Islero project continued in secret.

Rather bizarrely, it was the accident at Palomares years later that actually gave the scientists the key to designing an atomic bomb. Unconvinced by the American’s explanations for the debacle, the Spaniards working on plans discovered the Ulam-Teller method, which was fundamental to the development of the thermonuclear bomb or H-bomb.

However, the project was then frozen by Franco himself because he feared the United States would discover that Spain was trying to develop its own atomic bomb and impose economic sanctions.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish scientists secretly restarted the project, but in 1982 the new Socialist government discovered the plans and disbanded the project. By 1987 the González government announced Spain’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT and the issue has rarely even come up as an issue since then.

And despite that, Spain is a NATO member, regularly attends the G20, and often plays a leading role on the global stage. Certain elements of the dictatorship had eyes on building a nuclear arsenal, but it never happened. Franco ultimately worried about the economic repercussions of being discovered, and Spaniards were themselves sceptical about the idea based on the experience in Palomares.

In terms of nuclear weapons, Spain is what Portela describes as a ‘de-proliferation’ state – in other words, a country that aspired to have nuclear bombs but reversed it.

It doesn’t look like changing anytime soon either. A survey in 2021 showed that Spain had the highest level of support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with a massive 89 percent majority.

READ ALSO: Why is Spain not in the G20 (but is always invited)?

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