Human response to severe drought in Early Modern Catalonia. The case of Barcelona, Western Mediterranean (1620–1650)

Abstract

<jats:p>Abstract. Combining historical climatology and environmental history, this article examines the diverse range of strategies deployed by the city government of Barcelona to confront the recurrent drought episodes experienced between 1626 and 1650. First, our reconstruction of drought episodes for the period 1525–1821, based on pro pluvia rogations as documentary proxy data, identifies the years 1625–1635 and 1640–1650 as the most significative drought events of the period 1521–1825 (highest Drought Frequency Weighted Index of the series). Throughout the article, we focus on human responses to drought and discuss how water scarcity was perceived and confronted by Barcelona city authorities. We present the ambitious water supply projects launched by the city government, together with the construction of windmills as an alternative to watermills in order to mill grain, as attempts to cope with diminishing water flows. The context was aggravated by political instability, related first to the tensions between the centralising efforts of the Spanish King Philip IV and later to the impact of the Thirty Years’ War in the border region between the French and Spanish Crowns (1635–1659). Finally, we interpret the efforts of the city government to codify and appropriate knowledge about urban water supply as an attempt to systematise historical information on infrastructure to improve institutional capacities to cope with water scarcity in the future. These efforts materialised in the elaboration of the Llibre de les Fonts de la Ciutat de Barcelona (“Book of Fountains of the City of Barcelona”), a manual compiling the knowledge of Barcelona’s water supply from source to tap, written by the Barcelona water city officer in 1650, after three decades of experience in his post. </jats:p>

Droughts of the Early 19th Century (1790–1830) in Northeast Iberian Peninsula: Integration of historical and instrumental data for high-resolution reconstructions of extreme events

“…The sources of information used to analyse droughts in the Early 19th Century consist mainly of historical data and the Barcelona instrumental precipitation data series ranging from 1786 to the present day. The historical data on droughts in the Spanish Mediterranean Basin during the Early 19th Century was obtained from Documentary sources of public administrations and ecclesiastical institutions complied in the AMARNA database (Barriendos & Barriendos, 2021;Tuset et al, 2022). AMARNA is an archive that compiled climate historical episodes from different documentary sources which are geo-referenced and classified into numerical categories on a daily resolution.…”

“…They may be decisions by the authorities to initiate or continue pro pluvia rogations, qualitative records of rainfall within a drought episode, or records of the decisions taken by the authorities to end the rogations once the drought is considered to be over. The cases and episodes are classified into five categories and fifteen sub-categories (Barriendos & Barriendos, 2021) (Table 1). These fifteen thematic subdivisions proposed correspond to the highest degree of detail observable in the documentary and bibliographic sources consulted (Table 1).…”

“…Each drought episode will thus have a different duration and its severity will be defined by the ceremonies between the first rogation and the closing of the ceremonies. (Barriendos & Barriendos, 2021).…”

“…While magnitude, duration and recurrence are necessary drought features to assess the physical impacts of droughts on a territory, the vulnerability of the society in relation to degree of exposure and strategies to cope with the physical hazard are fundamental for a comprehensive evaluation of climate risk. Beyond contributing to direct water scarcity, droughts affect agriculture, hinder the production of energy, the access to fresh water and may aggravate political tensions connected to water rights (Gorostiza et al, 2021). Moreover, the socio-economic impacts of drought generally persist even when the episode of meteorological or hydrological drought ends and the volume of rainfall returns with regularity (IDMP, 2022).…”

megasequía de 1626-1635 y sus impactos en el valle medio del Ebro (España)

“…4 En Europa, la abundante información documental existente en muchas regiones favorece el creciente número de investigaciones que analizan los vínculos entre clima adverso y quebranto socioeconómico: por ejemplo, Pfister (1988: 25-53) en Suiza, Brázdil et al (2019b: 1-24) en la República Checa, Garnier (2019: 45-67) en Reino Unido y Francia, o White et al (2018: 331-353) en la Europa mediterránea. En España, desde los trabajos pioneros de Giralt i Raventós, la consideración climática y medioambiental está cada vez más presente en la investigación histórica con autores como Barriendos et al (2019: 1-15), Domínguez-Castro et al (2012: 705-722), Rodrigo (2001: 161-183), González-Beltrán (2005: 359-390), García Torres (2016: 323-351), Gorostiza et al (2020: 1-21) y, sobre todo, Alberola Romá (20112013;2014;2016: 923-934;2021), que afrontan el reto de conocer el modo como las sociedades del Antiguo Régimen y sus precarias economías soportaron estas dificultades y también en qué medida intentaron hacerles frente y mitigar sus resultados.…”