Elx Palm Grove. A World Heritage Site

Elx Palm Grove. A World Heritage Site

The Date Palm in Ancient Elx

The date palm was already known in Elx in the remote past. Fossilised date stones dated approximately 2800 BC have been uncovered in Los Tiestos Cave in Jumilla, Murcia less than 56 km from Elx. These remains are now on display in Jumilla’s Jerónimo Molina Museum.

The La Alcudia archaeological site, 2 km south of the present city, contains the ruins of the Iberian city of Heliké and the Roman colony of Colonia Iulia Ilici Augusta. At the site are various remains of decorated pottery illustrating how the Iberians used palm leaves, both in their natural state and also in a modified state, for ceremonial ends.

Natural clusters of palm trees must have occurred near springs, as in North Africa. Indeed Stone-Age cave paintings of palm trees can be seen in the grottoes of the Sahel.

This however is not the origin of Elx’s Historical Palm Grove which as we have seen is an oasis, created by man in his fight to master an especially arid and hostile environment.

The Palm Grove’s Muslim Origins I

Between the 7th and 8th centuries AD, Islam’s expansion led to a revolutionary merging of Iranian, Arabian and Saharan agricultural techniques.

The groups of Arabs and Berbers that settled in the Iberian Peninsula from 711 also brought with them new crops such as rice, cotton, citrus fruits, aubergines, sugar cane etc., as well as a wide range of irrigation techniques especially adapted to extremely arid conditions. Indeed, their ancient knowledge had already enabled such extraordinary civilisations as the Nabatean Arab desert city of Petra to flourish.

At the height of classical Islamic civilisation rational water management techniques continued to improve and the creation of large areas of irrigated farmland enabled towns and cities to expand. In cities such as Valencia channelled water irrigated the fields, provided watermills with energy and fed complex sewage systems, this latter being completely unknown in Christian Europe. New cities such as Basra and Baghdad in the Muslim East and Murcia at its western tip sprang up thanks to the development of complex irrigation systems in their surrounding areas.

Two large cities of the Islamic world in particular owe their prosperity to the establishing of two man-made oases: Marrakesh, founded in 1062 by the Almoravid leader, Yusuf Ibn Tashfin, and Elche, founded in the late 10th century by the Caliphate of Cordoba. The two sister cities shared many centuries of a common history under Almoravid and Aloha rule.

The Palm Grove’s Muslim Origins II

It can be stated categorically that Elx’s large oasis, its Palm Grove, was established by the Muslims who also founded today’s city, more than two kilometres distant from the Ancient city of Ilici. It is no coincidence that the Acequia Mayor, or Main Irrigation Channel, that feeds the Palm Grove via its numerous secondary channels with their Arabic or Arabised names, runs under the nucleus of the Islamic city of Elx. In the 12th century, the geographer Al-Idrisi described it thus: “Elx is a town built on a plain crossed by a canal fed by the river. This canal flows under its walls and the townspeople use it for their baths and it flows through markets and streets. The waters of this river are brackish and the inhabitants have to bring drinking water from the rains that fall in other places, water that they keep in cisterns”.

In Elx, which only receives 300 mm of rain per annum, farming is wholly dependent on irrigation. Without irrigation, only highly resistant species such as the olive could survive such arid conditions. Moreover the surface water available for irrigation is both scarce and of poor quality.

The Vinalopó River’s brackish waters have an average volume of flow of only 0.3 m3 per second. Elx’s Muslim founders designed its Palm Grove as a means of obtaining the greatest benefit from such a poor hydraulic resource since palm trees tolerate brackish water well while the layout of the plantations also enabled other associated species such as pomegranates and alfalfa to be grown.

Al-Andalus and the Palm Grove

The illuminators of the extraordinary manuscript Las Cantigas de Santa María, masterpiece of Castilian literature and written by King Alfonse X the Wise, who as crown prince captured Elx from the Moors, depict the Muslim city as a city of date palms.

The Arab geographer, Ibn Said, who visited Elx in the early 13th century, wrote a passage that was striking due to its evocation of an Arabian landscape. He emphasised in his writings that according to popular belief, the city of Elx recalled Madinat al-Nabi, or “the city of the Prophet”. This city, today better known as Saudi Arabia’s Medina, was founded by Mohammed on the banks of an oasis of date palms after his expulsion from Mecca, a time that came to be known as the Hegira or origin of the Muslim Era.

As a man-made phenomenon, the Palm Grove of Elx reflects the values and aspirations of those who created it. Its design therefore goes beyond the merely technical; it is a cultural landscape.

According to another medieval writer, Ibn al-Yasa, the Palm Grove produced the best dates in the whole of Al-Andalus. As such it is a unique, living tribute to the hydraulic culture developed by Islam in the Iberian Peninsula.

The Palm Grove moreover embodies the work of silent generations of peasants; men and women who transformed the desert into orchards by their genius and hard work, thus creating the material wealth that was the bedrock upon which the Andalusí culture’s splendour rested.

The Palm Grove, from Islam to Christendom 13th – 17th Centuries

Because of its enormous economic value, the large Andalusí oasis of Elx withstood the impact of the Christian conquest and other historical events with far-reaching consequences such as the expulsion in 1609 of the Moriscos, the last descendants of the Andalusís who had founded Elx and its oasis. In fact the new Christian settlers worked hard to improve the Palm Grove’s productivity, introducing improvements into the Acequia Mayor’s irrigation system such as the construction (1632 – 1640) of the reservoir that is still in use today.

Moreover, under Christian rule Elx developed a large craft industry based on the blanched palm leaf and its association with certain aspects of Christian ritual. The city soon became known as “the Jerusalem of the west”. The maximum expression of religious symbolism of the blanched palm leaf is undoubtedly the Elche Mystery Play or Festa d’Elx, a medieval religious lyrical drama. In the play a large blanched palm leaf established the mystic connexion between the Virgin, the Apostles, the celestial choir and the rest of the cast.

The Palm Grove’s Golden Age: the 18th – 19th Centuries

The Palm Grove greatly impressed the 18th century’s enlightened travellers as well as the artists, geographers and engineers who were to visit it a century later. This was the period when the Palm Grove’s plantations underwent their greatest expansion and the total number of trees, including both those in the urban plantations and those in the outlying areas must have easily exceeded 200,000 trees.

Cavanilles the botanist (1797) has left us a beautifully descriptive passage of the visual impact that Elx’s large oasis had upon travellers: “One’s sight grows tired at seeing the scrubland, aridity, neglect and hills that seem to prolong the journey to the point of exhaustion; however, when one is clear of the last gorge, when one looks upon the lands surrounding Elx and that forest of olive trees preceded by such an extent of cultivated land; when one sees in its centre the countless lofty palms concealing the buildings and part of the most populous city of the kingdom’s towers and domes, such is one’s surprise, so sweet the sensation, that the spectator desires nothing more than to arrive there, to learn everything about its value, its beauty, its products and inhabitants, all worthy of being described to the last detail”.

Menaced by Progress 19th – 20th Centuries

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the fortunes of the Elx Palm Grove underwent a dramatic change. The impact of both the industrial revolution and the city’s growth put the Grove’s continuity in danger. The railway, opened in 1884, cut a swathe through the large Palm Grove on the outskirts of the city, dividing it in two and encouraging Elche’s nascent footwear industry to occupy the adjacent plantations.

The city, for so long constrained by its huge belt of palm trees began to expand, destroying the adjacent palm plantations as it did so.

The fate of the Palm Grove seemed to be sealed, and even further when the agriculture of the oasis lost part of its raison d’être. Between 1915 and 1923 the two irrigation companies “Nuevos Riegos El Progreso” and “Riegos de Levante” that served Elche pumped the surplus waters from the Segura River and from other azarbes, or outfall canals, from the Vega Baja, from the Hondo lagoon to the borough. From 1979 Elche has also had access to water from the Tagus-Segura transfer.

Elche’s Townspeople defend the Palm Grove

Fortunately however, the people of Elche reacted. By the 1920’s there were already qualified voices being raised in protest, led by the municipal archivist, Pedro Ibarra y Ruiz. Thanks to his dogged campaigning, the value of the Palm Grove was recognised both locally and nationally. In 1933 the II Republic passed legislation to protect the Palm Grove and in 1943, during Franco’s dictatorship, it was declared “an Artistic Garden”.

Between the 1920’s and 80’s, Elx’s Town Hall developed an exhaustive set of by-laws with the aim of protecting the Palm Grove more efficiently. Urban growth was concentrated on the right bank of the Vinalopó, away from the plantations. Interventions within the Palm Grove had, as a precondition, to respect the palm trees and the plantation structure.

Present State of Conservation

From a historical point of view the Palm Grove’s present state of conservation is reasonable while it has a promising future due to the fact that since the 1980’s there has been a determined public policy whose aim is to conserve and improve it. This policy is based on two pieces of milestone legislation, the 1986 Law regulating ownership of the Grove and Elche’s 1997 General Town Planning Plan.

Now that the conflict between the city’s modernisation and the conservation of its Palm Grove has been successfully solved, activity has concentrated upon the biological improvement of the Palm Grove’s date palms.

The Phoenix Date Palm Research Station is successfully addressing this issue. Hope is also being generated by the research under way in order to produce improved species making it possible for palm cultivation to become economically viable. The Palm Grove’s biological improvement is ensured due to the actions undertaken by the Town Hall, especially by the transplanting of young date palms grown in its nurseries.

The Town Hall is also doing important work in the field of keeping alive traditions related to the cultivation and use of the date palm. Today Elx’s best palmerers, or palm tree workers, are Town Hall employees. Traditional palm crafts and traditions are also backed by the Town Hall through the systematic organisation of date palm workshops. For those interested, the workshops teach how to produce blanched palm leaves and how to work them.