page_title: Carcaixent
section_title: Birthplace of the orange
hierarchical_section_title: Carcaixent / Birthplace of the orange
caption_attribution_description: Hesperides were guardians of the tree that produced golden apples, a gift to earth from Hera
context_page_description: Carcaixent is a town and municipality in the province of Valencia, eastern Spain, with c. 20,000 inhabitants. Its origins go back to prehistoric Iberian and Roman times, with some remainders in its area. It is located in the Ribera Alta comarca, 40 km south of the provincial capital Valencia. It is the birthplace of the orange growth and its flourishing commerce in the 19th and 20th centuries. Currently, its inhabitants live basically on agriculture and the service sector.
context_section_description: The orange is the fruit made from Spain, through Valencia, and spreading throughout the rest of the world. In Greek mythology the Garden of the Hesperides is a mythological grove where apples grew tended to by nymphs and a dragon. Hercules, the hero of classical literature, killed the guardian, entered the garden and plucked those golden apples –In later years it was thought that the "golden apples" might have actually been oranges, a fruit unknown to Europe before the Middle Ages. Several scholars defend that the etymology of the word comes from the Sanskrit term narang and the Persian word narensh. When Arabs brought orange farming to the Iberian Peninsula, they called the fruits naranjah. The Region of Valencia maintained the orange-farming tradition after the Arabic period, with references to orange trees in the city of Valencia dating back to the 14th century. In fact, there is an Orange Courtyard inside Valencia’s 15th-century Silk Exchange market (La Llotja de la Seda), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The first references to commercial orange plantations date back to the 18th century.
  According to the historical records, in 1781 parish priest Vicente Monzó and two acquaintances, notary and scribe Carlo Maseres and pharmacist Jacinto Bodí, planted the first fields of orange trees in the municipal area of Carcaixent known as Les Basses del Rey. The trees thrived in the land, favoured by the benign Mediterranean climate, and adapted perfectly to Valencian soil both on rain-fed farmland and irrigated land fed by river Júcar, whose extensive irrigation channel distributed fertile water around the whole of the Ribera Alta. In the early 19th century, orange trees gradually started to replace other crops, such as rice, cereal and mulberries, taking over as the main local crop. Wholesale exports of oranges commenced in this century, fuelled by the arrival of the railway that connected Valencia, Xàtiva, Algemesí, La Pobla Llarga, Alzira and Carcaixent (1853). The rail line from Carcaixent to Gandía and Dénia that opened in 1864 continued to operate until the early 1970s. The Carcaixent-Dénia line was one of the oldest narrow rail tracks in mainland Spain.
caption: The Garden of the Hesperides by Frederick, Lord Leighton, 1892.
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