Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 254

The Ebro valley, in north-eastern Spain, constitutes that country’s most important river system. Due to its semi-arid climate, the area has a long tradition of irrigation dating back two millennia. During the late nineteenth century, when rural Spain was ravaged by the ubiquitous Agricultural Depression, caused by the invasion of cheap wheat from the United States and Tsarist Russia, many influential commentators south of the Pyrenees diagnosed irrigation as a panacea for the nation’s cereal farmers, whose livelihoods were seriously under threat. The fundamental question was: who should pay? Private individuals, who had so far shown little inclination, or the near-bankrupt state? At the turn of the century, when Spain was humiliated by the loss of Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898, regenerationist politicians, foremost among them the Aragonese polymath Joaquín Costa, attempted – with only limited success – to persuade the reluctant political class of the Restoration regime to adopt what he termed an ‘hydraulic policy’. Later, when the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera sought to modernize the backward country through the implementation of a comprehensive programme of infrastructural reforms, the regenerationists finally got their way. As Vicente Pinilla recounts in his tidy introduction to this exhaustive treatment of the management and uses of water in the Ebro valley during the twentieth century, by this stage a combination of incipient economic growth and a belated demographic revolution gave rise to a growing demand for water for a variety of purposes. The best-known and most enduring outcome of such pressures was the Hydrographical Confederation of the Ebro (Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro – CHE), founded in 1926 under the direction of the engineer Manuel Lorenzo Pardo. This collective volume, edited by Vicente Pinilla, was almost a decade in the making. The book was originally intended to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the pioneering Ebro Confederation in 2001. In its present form, it accompanies the international exhibition on ‘Water and Sustainable Development’ taking place in Zaragoza in the summer of 2008.

After a background geographical surveys of the landscape, ecology, climate, vegetation and soils of the Ebro valley, together with its potential for irrigation, by Paloma Ibarra, Fernando Pérez, Isabel Rabanque and Víctor Rodrigo, the book is divided into five sections of varying length. The first of these sections focuses on the institutions that were responsible for the management of the water, including three essays from Antonio Fanlo, Eloy Fernández Clemente and Ernesto Clar on diverse aspects of the CHE. Secondly there are five wide-ranging contributions, by Joseán Garrigués, Luis Germán, Josep Maria Ramon, Antonio Peiró and Vicente Pinilla, on long-term changes in the water infrastructure along the Ebro, from the mountainous terrain of the Upper Ebro to Catalonia, where the river flows into the Mediterranean. Thirdly, the work contains no less than seven accounts by agricultural historians on the use of irrigation by farmers in Navarre and Álava (Iñaki Iriarte and José Miguel Lana), La Rioja (José Ramón Moreno), Aragon (Alberto Sabio) Lleida and Tarragona (Josep Maria Ramon and Víctor Bretón). Fourthly, there are five studies, by Joseán Garrigués, Luis Germán, Martí Boneta, Juan Manuel Matés and Ernesto Clar, on the non-agricultural uses of water, with a special emphasis on hydro-electricity. The volume concludes with three analyses of the impact of water management and its usage on the environment (Paloma Ibarra, Juan de la Riva, Iñaki Iriarte, Víctor Rodrigo and Isabel Rabanque), demography (Ernesto Clar and Javier Silvestre) and economic development (Alfonso Herranz). In addition, the book boasts an abundance of information in the form of graphs, tables and maps. There is also an extensive bibliography which bears ample tribute to the outstanding contribution of Spain’s geographers, agricultural and economic historians to the study of that scarce commodity, water, and its many uses.

All the contributors to this detailed and exhaustive study, without exception, are to be congratulated for the depth of their understanding, encyclopaedic range and original approach to the emerging debate on the role of water in modern times. Their collective study of the Ebro valley should serve as a model for future analyses. Long in gestation, it will surely stand the test of time.