The Orange Plantations in Picanya

Very often the memory of the orchard can be mistaken, above all when assessing the type of traditional agriculture, because of the belief that exists about the orange plantations, considering them as lifelong. In reality we can say that the orange plantations are a reality that takes shape in the last decades of the 19th century, around 1880, and that would have a slow but unstoppable evolution. Towards the first third of the 20th century, the orange trees already occupy 60% of the total area of the Picanya district; the regularity of these plantations is the general note and the shapes of the plots are erased by a horizontal vision of the landscape due to the predominance of the orange trees. Beneath the green, continuous mantle that is maintained throughout the year, the boundary markers and the irrigation channels that separate the fields remain hidden. Only the paths appear step by step as a note in the physiognomy of the rural setting. The white oranges were the first to be planted at the beginning of the orange expansion. Among them, the Comuna stands out first and later the Cadenera and the Salustiana. In 1943 the white oranges occupied second place among the different varieties with 3,210 anegadas, that is, 18.5% of the area. Their decline became visible in the mid-1960s, when they lost their hegemony and reached only 2.10% of the total plantation.

During the first years of development in Picanya, the Thompson played a major role, even though the Washington later predominated. Progressively, the good climate in the Picanya orchard would be one of the decisive elements for farmers to orient their crops towards earlier varieties.

In the decade of the 1940s, the strong predominance of citrus over the rest of the harvests is recorded: the number of trees is 164,192, occupying 5,792 anegadas. This explains the boom that the businesses would experience as early as 1925. To the agricultural wealth is added the citrus trade through various warehouses founded in the second half of the 19th century, which had been experiencing notable growth up to the 1940s.

In the first third of the 20th century, there were around 10 orange warehouses in Picanya. The warehouse owners were, as a rule, individual exporters who ran their own business on a personal level and were in charge of all the work of harvesting, transport and the direct hiring of seasonal labour.

Female involvement played a very important role in handling the orange; the various businesses hired the labour of a large number of women from the village, thus providing for a few months a fundamental supplement to the family economy.

The proportion of employment among men was also quite significant: harvesters, alfarrasadors (crop appraisers), cabasseros (basket carriers), encaixadors (packers), carters, carpenters who inside the orange warehouses assembled the wooden crates, hammering the nails with extraordinary skill. It could be said that throughout the campaign the citrus trade mobilised almost the entire active population of Picanya.