“The city of Elche can be recognized through the date palms that cover its entire district. (...) For a moment, one believes himself to be transported to the plains of Syria or to the shores of the Delta.” The words of the French traveler Alexandre de Laborde still apply even 200 years later. Despite the buildings that now inevitably punctuate its present-day landscape, this Mediterranean coastal town–a little powerhouse of world pomegranate production–still has a distinct look of Al-Andalus about it. Its Palmeral was declared a World Heritage Site in 2000: this area of formally laid-out date palm groves is an eloquent example of man’s battle against the elements to transform a hostile, arid environment into fertile land.
The Islamic colonizers of the Iberian Peninsula brought with them their traditional mastery of the oasis principle: this amounted to a sustainable, revolutionary irrigation system for carrying out intensive horticulture. Rows of date palms helped create a benign microclimate, making it poss ble to grow fruit trees and other plants previously unknown in the Christian world. Among these was the pomegranate, which soon became the sultan’s favorite. As Ibn Said, respected chronicler of the period, records: “Abd al Rahman I planted strange seeds brought to him from Syria by his ambassadors, which bore curious fruits. The monarch was delighted by the loveliness and beauty of the pomegranate and disseminated it the length and breadth of al-Andalus.”
This Arab legacy found a second home on Spain’s east coast. Those early pomegranates adapted readily to the hot Mediterranean climate, saline soil and scant rainfall characteristic of this part of the world. While the genetic changes they have undergone through the centuries have not been precisely identified, the two varieties currently grown in the Spanish countryside, Valenciana and Mollar de Elche, are known to be exclusive to this area. Though they are grown all over the world nowadays, the history of pomegranates stretches back several millennia to w stern Asia. From Iran to northern India, pomegranates were cultivated by various civilizations, starting with the Egyptians–a picture of a pomegranate adorns the tomb of Rameses IV–and subsequently the Phoenicians. Having become firmly established on the Iberian Peninsula under Arab domination, they crossed the Atlantic to the Americas on the ships of Spanish missionaries who disseminated them, along with their religion, in the state of California. It is a story of peaceful conquest whose final chapter has yet to be written. As we speak, different varieties of pomegranate are extending their domain on every continent. We tracked down the sweetest of the lot to the costal area of eastern Spain known as El Levante. Thousand-year old orchards “These trees have been here forever! You have only to drop a seed on the ground and a pomegranate tree grows.”
