Introduction
We have to go back to the fifteenth century to find the first mentions of rice cultivation on the Baix Ter plain. Despite the health risk of serious illnesses associated with mosquitos, this crop’s larger yield compared with wheat, justified cultivating rice for seven hundred years. Nonetheless, in 1837 a royal order prohibited the cultivation of rice in all of the Empordà because it was erroneously blamed for causing epidemics.
It is worth noting the importance of this type of cultivation for its environmental and scenic significance. The presence of water in the rice fields turns them into a rich ecosystem where the proliferation of floating and submerged plants attract great quantitates of aquatic animals which in turn act as food for amphibians, birds and mammals.