L’Horta de València is a Mediterranean plain that until the middle of the 20th century was home to a proliferating irrigated agriculture whose landscape fascinated visitors for centuries.
Mediterranean large hortes are cultural landscapes -human creations - result and testimony of ancient agricultural activity. Likewise, the uncontrolled urban growth of Mediterranean cities over the last few decades has led to the progressive reduction of agricultural spaces and the degradation of the remaining horticultural landscapes.
Nowadays, it is very unlikely to reverse the lost landscape of the Mediterranean large hortes; it is much more viable to maintain what has not yet disappeared, but it is in danger of doing so due to the lack of economic viability and generational change among the farmers.
From the landscape of l'horta that has already disappeared irreversibly, it is necessary to highlight that one of the best preserved heritage elements is precisely the toponymy. The archaic linguistic forms of site names, fossilised in time, make toponymy an exceptional and diachronic descriptor of the landscape.
In the papers
- Anàlisi toponímica de l’Horta de València, by Joan C. Membrado-Tena and Emilio Iranzo (https://dag.revista.uab.es/article/view/v64-n2-membrado-tena-iranzo) and
- L’Horta a través dels seus noms, by Joan C. Membrado-Tena (https://metode.cat/revistes-metode/article/horta-traves-dels-noms.html)
a toponymic approximation of the lost landscape of l'Horta de València and its natural environment is carried out.
After analysing the semantic content of the urban toponyms of l'Horta de València it is possible to virtually reconstruct a cultural landscape that has largely disappeared. It would be an open landscape of irrigated large hortes (normally arable crops irrigated from a complex hydraulic system of irrigation canals and water wheels) that towards the mountain becomes rainfed land (with tree and shrub crops, especially olives and vines); with a concentrated and above all dispersed population -especially in alqueríes- connected to each other by paths and roads that had hostels around them; also highlights the presence of ravines, salt lakes, springs, marshes and accidents of the coast, as well as rocky areas and elevated in the west and in the north, also with towers and fortresses of defence and some port facility.
