Valencian Community

The Valencian Community (officially in Valencian; Comunitat Valenciana; Spanish: Comunidad Valenciana) is an Autonomous Community located in central and south-eastern Spain. It is divided into three provinces, from south to north: Alicante, Valencia and Castellón.

It has 518 km of Mediterranean coastline and covers 23,259 km² of land with 5.02 million inhabitants (2008). Its borders largely reflect those of the historic Kingdom of Valencia.

The current version of the Valencian Statute of Autonomy declares the Region of Valencia a nationality. The official languages are Spanish and Valencian (Catalan). The region's capital is the city of Valencia.

This Autonomous Community is a prototypical example of the "Mediterranean Spain", with a fantastic climate and more than 500 kilometres of coast. It is decidedly one of the country's most touristic areas.

If you want to discover more than just sun and sand, you will find remains of most remote civilizations, Phoenicians, Greeks, Iberians and Romans. The Moorish legacy is still present in traditional craftsman work and agriculture with its praised oranges as well as rice. The conquests of Jaime de Aragon led to the foundation of the kingdom of Valencia, more or less at the territory of today’s Community.

Geography

The inland part of the territory is mountainous, with the highest peaks in the Valencia and Castellón provinces which form part of the Iberian Range. The mountains in the Alicante province are in turn a part of the Subbetic range. The Region of Valencia administers the tiny Columbretes islands and the coastal Tabarca islet.

The most emblematic mountain is the Penyagolosa, in the Alcalatén area. It is widely thought to be the highest peak with its 1,813 m., but actually the highest peak is the Calderón (1,839 m.) located in the Rincón de Ademuz, a Valencian exclave where there are three more peaks over 1,500 m. The most emblematic mountain in the southern part of the territory is the Aitana (1,558 m.).

The rather thin coastal strip is a very fertile plain mainly free of remarkable mountains except those around the Cabo de la Nao area and the Peñíscola area in the Castellón province. Typical of this coastal area are wetlands and marshlands such as L'Albufera close to Valencia, El Fondó in Elche, the Marjal near Pego or el Prat in Cabanes, also the former wetlands and salt evaporation ponds in the Santa Pola and Torrevieja area. All of them are key RAMSAR sites which make Valencia of high relevance for both migratory and resident seabirds and waterbirds.

There are many important coastal dunes in the Saler area near the Albufera and in the Guardamar area, both of them were planted with thousands of trees during the 19th century in order to fix the dunes, thus forming now protected areas of remarkable ecologic value.

Climate

Valencia has a generally mild climate, heavily influenced by the neighbouring Mediterranean sea. Still, there are important differences between areas:

Proper Mediterranean climate. It roughly goes along the coastal plain from the northernmost border through the Benidorm area (cities included here are, amongst others, Castelló de la Plana, Gandia and València). It covers in various grades the lower inland areas. In this area, winters are cool, summers are long, dry and hot; rainfall occurs mostly during spring and autumn, usually totalling around 600 mm. with a remarkably wetter micro climate in the Marina Alta and La Safor comarques just north of the Cabo la Nao cape, which accumulates an average of up to 1000 mm. due to the orographic lift phenomenon.

Mediterranean to continental climate transition zone. These are the innermost lands and some of those closer to the sea but at a higher elevation (cities included here are, amongst others, Alcoi, Morella, Requena, Villena). Here winters are cool to cold (a few days of snow are not unusual), summers mild to hot and rainfall more evenly distributed through the year.

Mediterranean to semiarid climate. It roughly goes along the coastal plain from Villajoyosa through the southernmost border of the region (cities included here are, amongst others, Alicante, Elche, Orihuela and Torrevieja). Summers are very long, hot to very hot and very dry, winters are cool to mild and its most prominent feature is a very scarce precipitation, typically below 300 mm. per year which is most likely to happen during spring and autumn. The reason for this lack of precipitation is the marked rain shadow effect caused by hills to the west of the Alicante province (and, to a lesser degree, those in the northern part of the province which, in turn, enhance the inverse orographic lift effect around Cabo de la Nao)

History

The Christian Kingdom of Valencia (Regne de Valencia in Valencian), located in the Eastern shore of the Iberian Peninsula, was one of the component realms of the Crown of Aragon. When the Crown of Aragon merged by dynastic union with the Crown of Castile to conform the Kingdom of Spain, then the Kingdom of Valencia subsequently became a component realm of the Spanish Monarchy.

The Kingdom of Valencia was formally created in 1237 when the Moorish taifa of Valencia was taken in the course of the Reconquista. It was terminated by Philip V of Spain in 1707, by means of the Nueva Planta decrees, as a result of the Spanish War of Succession.

During its existence, the Kingdom of Valencia was ruled by the laws and institutions stated in the Charters of Valencia (Furs de València) which granted it wide self government, initially from the Crown of Aragon and, later on, from the Spanish Kingdom.

The boundaries and identity of the present Spanish Autonomous Community of Valencia are essentially based on those of the former Kingdom of Valencia.

The Kingdom of Valencia achieved its height during the early 15th century. The economy was prosperous and centred around trading through the Mediterranean Sea, which had become increasingly controlled by the Crown of Aragon, mostly from the ports of Valencia and Barcelona.

In the city of Valencia the Taula de canvis was created, functioning partly as a bank and partly as a stock exchange market; altogether it boosted trading. The local industry, specially textile manufactures, achieved great development and the city of Valencia turned into a Mediterranean trading emporium where traders from all Europe worked. Perhaps the best symbol which summarizes this flamboyant period is the Silk Exchange, one of the finest European examples of civil Gothic architecture and a major trade market in the Mediterranean by the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century.

Valencia was one of the first cities in Europe to install a movable type printing press as per the designs of Johannes Gutenberg. It was Valencian authors such as Joanot Martorell or Ausiàs March who conformed the canon of classic Catalan literature.

In 1479, Ferdinand ascended to the throne as King of Aragon. With his earlier marriage to Queen Isabella of Castile, the modern Kingdom of Spain was born. Valencia began a slow process of integration with the rest of Spain. When Ferdinand and Isabella's grandson Charles came to the throne, the crowns were permanently joined together in personal union. The kings of Habsburg Spain (January 23, 1516 – November 1, 1700) maintained the privileges and liberties of the territories and cities which formed the kingdom and its legal structure and factuality remained intact. A new position, Viceroy of Valencia, was created to manage the officially independent Kingdom. Meanwhile the rising Spanish Empire had left behind its former status as a Kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula and had emerged as a Great power. The Empire shifted its focus to the Spanish colonization of the Americas and its possessions in Europe, rather than its Iberian territories.

During the 16th century Valencia lost its status as a preeminent commercial centre of Europe to the rapidly developing cities of Northern and Central Europe. Within Spain, the Atlantic trade favoured the cities of Andalusia such as Cádiz. This was largely due to diminishing profits from the Mediterranean trade. The Spanish Empire was in frequent conflict with the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean. They prevented each other from reaching certain ports while Ottoman privateers such as Barbarossa preyed on trade ships. The Barbary pirates such as Dragut, operating out of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Salé and ports in Morocco, attacked shipping in the western Mediterranean, which included destructive raids in Christian ports along the coast. This decline in trade greatly inhibited the economy in Valencia, which had already been economically affected by the Alhambra decree which had expelled the Jews back in 1492.

In 1519, the young King Charles I granted the Germanies (literally "brotherhoods") permission to arm themselves to fight off the Muslim raiders. The Germanies were artisan guilds who also, at first with the government's permission, served as civilian militias to fight raiding pirates. However, the Germanies also had an economic agenda favouring the commoner-dominated guilds that clashed with the aristocracy. After the recently appointed Viceroy of Valencia Diego Hurtado de Mendoza refused to seat elected officials who favoured the Germanies in 1520, a full fledged revolt broke out, the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (Revolta de les Germanies). It lasted well into 1522, and shared many traits as the contemporaneous Revolt of the Comuneros in Castile. Aside from economic resentment of the aristocracy, the revolt also featured a strong anti-Muslim aspect, as the superstitious populace blamed Muslims, homosexuals, and other outcasts for a plague that struck the city. The mudéjars (Muslims) were seen as allies of the aristocracy, as they worked in the nobility's large farms and undercut the Valencians on wages making them competitors for scarce jobs. During the revolt, the agermanats killed many Muslims and forcibly baptized the rest. Even after the Germanies were suppressed it was ruled that these baptisms were valid, sparking a new revolt of the Moriscos (Muslim "converts").

As a result of the exhausted forces left by the clashes between nobles and high bourgeoisie versus the general populace and lesser bourgeoisie, the king used this power vacuum to enlarge his share of power and gradually diminish the ones of the local authorities; this meant that his requests for money in order to enlarge or consolidate the disputed possessions in Europe were progressively more frequent, more imperative and, conversely, less reciprocated for the Kingdom of Valencia, just as they were elsewhere for the rest of the Spanish Kingdom territories.

Then the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 was the final blow for the Kingdom of Valencia, as thousands of people were forced to leave, entire villages were deserted, and the countryside lost its main labour force, in all, some 125,000 people are supposed to have left the land[1]. The expulsion was broadly welcome with the Valencian citizenry, especially for its more popular segments. Since the expulsion meant the loss of a cheap workforce for the nobility, themselves and the upper bourgeoisie had to turn to the king seeking protection from the general populace, which meant that they had to renounce their former check and balance role before the requests of the kings, which was one of the driving forces of the Kingdom's autonomy.

The Kingdom of Valencia as a legal and politic organization was finally terminated in 1707 as a result of the Spanish War of Succession. The local population mostly took side and provided troops and resources for Archduke Charles, the pretender who was arguably to maintain the legal status quo. His utter defeat at the Battle of Almansa, near the borders of the Kingdom of Valencia, meant its legal and politic termination, along with other autonomous parliaments in the Crown of Aragon, as the Nueva Planta Decrees were passed and the new King Philip V of Spain of the House of Bourbon created a centralized Spain.