I'm not sure why BBC finds it so fascinating that the Moors were able to dig ditches and channel water through them 500 years after the Romans had built highly advanced aqueducts in Spain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduct_of_Segovia, https://fascinatingspain.com/place-to-visit/the-best-of/the-...). All I can guess is that some civilizations are more in vogue than others. In fact when the Moors invaded Spain, they destroyed much of the Roman infrastructure in a fit of religious fanaticism so a great deal of it has been lost.
The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
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Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#32OK, I have nothing bad to say about acequias or irrigation. Having grown up with a big orchad at home I enjoyed watching all those water inventions. Not sure about "Moorish". More like "muslim era" heritage? "Making life possible in one of Europe's driest regions" is misleading though. Eastwards Sierra Nevada you find Almería, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. It's indeed a desertic zone, just not a very…
You are simply wrong and are touching a sensitive point.
I grew up in Córdoba (which is west from Sierra Nevada). It gets to 49 centigrades in the summer. It’s not officially considered “a desert”… but it will soon. Temperature has been going up and rain went down. Fewer plants survive each summer.
This is a pattern that you see through all the Spanish south. Desertification is a big, visible problem that should not be minimized. I recommend that you apply your own advice to yourself.
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#33OK, I have nothing bad to say about acequias or irrigation. Having grown up with a big orchad at home I enjoyed watching all those water inventions. Not sure about "Moorish". More like "muslim era" heritage? "Making life possible in one of Europe's driest regions" is misleading though. Eastwards Sierra Nevada you find Almería, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. It's indeed a desertic zone, just not a very…
You are simply wrong and are touching a sensitive point. I grew up in Córdoba (which is west from Sierra Nevada). It gets to 49 centigrades in the summer. It’s not officially considered “a desert”… but it will soon. Temperature has been going up and rain went down. Fewer plants survive each summer. This is a pattern that you see through all the Spanish south. Desertification is a big, visible problem that should not…
You are simply wrong
So the headline is precise and I'm wrong when I say those acequias can only provide water for small zones... and because it's a "sensitive point", nobody can disagree.
Appaling.
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#34I'm not sure why BBC finds it so fascinating that the Moors were able to dig ditches and channel water through them 500 years after the Romans had built highly advanced aqueducts in Spain ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduct_of_Segovia , https://fascinatingspain.com/place-to-visit/the-best-of/the-... ). All I can guess is that some civilizations are more in vogue than others. In fact when the Moors invaded Spain,…
This is specifically about channeling and storing water _in_ the ground, not piping it above the ground.
This also requires far less resources than building an aqueduct.
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only know the region as a repeat tourist (just came back from my second visit this year), but my impression from this is that locals are quite proud of their cosmopolitan past and "moro" is the simply term they use for their melting pot ancestors of that era. Nothing negative about it at all.
>but my impression from this is that locals are quite proud of their cosmopolitan past and "moro" Literally no one is. There is a vast difference between giving credit for a given concept/tool/technique because it's useful, and thinking the locals have sort of ancestral connection with a foreign invader.
Don't speak for a whole country. There are people that are proud of this heritage, like me, and many more, especially in the places where Moorish culture had a stronghold (e.g. Andalusia, C. Valenciana, Murcia, etc.)
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#36OK, I have nothing bad to say about acequias or irrigation. Having grown up with a big orchad at home I enjoyed watching all those water inventions. Not sure about "Moorish". More like "muslim era" heritage? "Making life possible in one of Europe's driest regions" is misleading though. Eastwards Sierra Nevada you find Almería, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. It's indeed a desertic zone, just not a very…
> Not sure about "Moorish".
IMHO this is one of the few reasonable uses of this term (which has otherwise acquired a negative connotation). The Muslims who colonized Iberia were referred to as Moors because of their Maghreb origin (cf old Mauritania), which itself is the other, technical, use of the term.
And given that it’s the BBC I’d give them a pass for correct usage, even if it’s likely few in the audience will get it, with many instead enjoying the derogatory implication.
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#37How does that differ from ancien Rome's aqueducts?
They're canals which feed into underground aquifers which then feed streams somewhere else.
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#38OK, I have nothing bad to say about acequias or irrigation. Having grown up with a big orchad at home I enjoyed watching all those water inventions. Not sure about "Moorish". More like "muslim era" heritage? "Making life possible in one of Europe's driest regions" is misleading though. Eastwards Sierra Nevada you find Almería, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. It's indeed a desertic zone, just not a very…
New Mexico, one of the beneficaries of the acqueia system, is even more of a "true" desert than Almeria, and yet it would still not be wrong to say that the system helped make life possible here. The population density just before the Spanish arrived was not high, but it was lower than it was since they bought this water management technique to the area.
Just because such a region does not have a city like Madrid or even Albuquerque does not mean that people do not live there, nor that they are not reliant to some extent on acqueias.
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#39There must be hundreds of places around the world who could make use of this. How many other ones in Spain have been abandoned? If this was established by the Moors then I would guess other ex-Moor states would have a similar setup.
The same system exists across parts of the north American southwest colonized/taken over by the Spanish. New Mexico still has many acqueias, though like Span, less and less each year as the skills and desire to manage them, uhm, dries up.
Re: The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains
#40> All these customs are being lost and young people don't want to know about it
I don't understand why this knowledge isn't being written down.