Introduction
You have spent almost all of this outing going around a lake you will not see at any time, the old lake of Bellcaire. Bellcaire lake was a marsh which occupied the fields and irrigation channels that are alongside you. It was drained some time ago, specifically in the mid-eighteenth century, to create good farmland.
The practice of draining marshes was very common in the past, both for agriculture and to eradicate “paludism” or malaria, which was not classed as eradicated in Spain until 1964, after the loss of wetlands and the large-scale application of highly toxic insecticides like DDT.
Although it is a totally artificial space, this old lake contains plant species which are threatened in Catalonia and have an important conservation value.
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