De Salses a Guardamar i de Fraga a l’Alguer: les comarques de parla catalana una a una. 64/88: la Ribera Baixa (València, Valencian Country).
Ribera Baixa (Lower ) is a costal shire in the Valencian Country. Its capital city is Sueca, hometown of the writer and intellectual Joan Fuster, the most influential Valencian essayist of the 20th century. He wrote about the Valencian history, language and identity and the broader Catalan identity (which includes Valencians, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Franja). For his writings, he spent years receiving death threats from fascists, and they even set bombs in his house in 1978 and 1981. The explosions destroyed his home and library, but he survived. None of the fascists who set the explosives were ever arrested.
The landscape of this shire is characterized by the rice and citrus fields (fields occupy 82% of the shire's surface), and the Albufera Natural Park. The Albufera de València is a coastal lagoon with a great importance for the population, because it has been for centuries a place where the traditional way of living got its food from in harmony. Its beauty has also always been recognized, making it a landscape protected by law since the Middle Ages. Nowadays, it's still an important place in Valencian culture and identity, but it's threatened by urban expansion, tourism (which destroyed a small part of the habitat to build a golf field) and its connections with climate change.
Photos from Wikimedia Commons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, comunitatvalenciana, sancholovesarts, and Comunitat Valenciana, 2.
