Regional Geopolitics, French Geography, and Climatology in “Dry Spain,” Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries: Birth of the “Mediterranean Climate”

Regional Geopolitics, French Geography, and Climatology in “Dry Spain,” Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries: Birth of the “Mediterranean Climate” Alberto Celis and Lino Camprubí Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................................... 2 2 Spanish and French “Climate theory”: Between the Decline of the Habsburgs and the Rise of the Bourbons ................................................................ 4 3 Equating “dry Spain” to the “Mediterranean region” from French Imperialism to Spanish Regenerationism .................................................................. 8 4 The “Mediterranean climate” Has Changed: Putting the Sea Back in the Mediterranean ............................................................................. 15 5 Conclusion .................................................................................... 17 References ........................................................................................ 18 Abstract While its limits and definitions are still widely discussed, the Mediterranean region is a firm unit of analysis both in the earth and environmental sciences and in history. The connections between the scientific and the historical approaches to the Mediterranean region are widely recognized in the literature, at least since the works of Fernand Braudel. French and German physical geography first defined a botanic and climatic region which then human geographers and historians interpreted as a space partly determining a shared human past. This chapter contributes to this historiography by highlighting continuities between early modern scientific and political interest in “dry Spain” and later climatological definitions of the “Mediterranean climate” as characterized by summer droughts—a definition which became global through Wladimir Köppen’s extension of the Mediterranean climate to places like California, South Africa, and southern Australia. This conceptualization, however, contradicts current approaches to defining the Mediterranean climate by seasonal rains induced by the Mediterranean S ea. A. Celis (✉) · L. Camprubí Universidad de Sevilla/DEEPMED, Seville, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] 1 © The Author(s) 2025 E. Aronova et al. (eds.), Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92679-3_26-1 2 A. Celis and L. Camprubí Keywords Mediterranean climate · Mediterranean history · French imperialism · Mediterranean region · Env ironmental history · French geography · Climate theory 1 Introduction While the historical literature on the Earth and environmental sciences is rapidly growing, the focus remains on the development of global concepts—say “fossil record,” “climate change,” and “Anthropocene” (Heymann and Dah an 2019). Nonetheless, a few historians have insisted that local scales are an essential step in building global earth-system concepts (Hulme 2010; Coen 2016; Camprubí and Lehmann 2018). Historians of polar science have been particularly successful in locating the significance of regional histories of geopolitics and geoknowledge (Howkins and Roberts 2023). This chapter enquires about the history of a paradoxical regional climatic concept: the “Mediterranean climate.” The paradox we refer to is dual. First, the “Mediterranean climate” refers to regions as far from the Mediterranean Sea as California and Australia. Second, until recent decades, the “Mediterranean climate” did barely consider the role of the “Mediterranean Sea” in shaping atmospheric dynamics. These are two sides of the same coin: the detachment of the “Mediterranean climate” from the Mediterranean Sea. In our day, when climatologists are questioning this detachment, the question of how the “Mediterranean climate” came to be as a scientific concept becomes particularly pressing. We want to contribute to its answer by paying attention to regional geopolitics and the notion of “dry Spain.” The link between geopolitics and geohistory in the Mediterranean is a wellestablished theme. In 1949, historian Fernand Braudel presented the first version of The Mediterranean, which in 1966 grew into the famous three volumes which composed the second edition. The environmental longue durée occupied most of the work, and it provided a sort of stable background capable of explaining social, economic, and political history. According to Braudel, writing the history of the Mediterranean region consisted first and forem ost in identifying the two longuedurée environmental structures determining Mediterranean history: a common “Mediterranean climate” and surface sea currents enabling connectivity between Mediterranean peoples (Braudel 1949). This (contested) connection between the status of the Mediterranean as an object in both history and in the earth and environmental sciences has been widely recognized in the historical literature (Bourguet et al. 1998; Paris 2002; Wick 2016; Cazzato 2017). In the mid-nineteenth century, Élisée Reclus was perhaps among the first in the French tradition in bringing together physical and human geography when describing the Mediterranean region (Ruel 1991). Braudel himself acknowledged his debts to Italian, French, and German, physical geography and climatology (Paris 2002). Later works would compl ete and problematize this tradition. In his The Mountains of the Mediterranean World, environmental historian John McNeil recognized the Mediterranean as a distinct ecological region, defined by the mountain chains that run parallel to the coast both north and south of the Sea (McNeill 1992: 12). Unlike his predecessors, McNeill’s approach drew from plate tectonics to argue for geological unity at the base of the environmental resemblances of Mediterranean mountains. Focusing his attention on five of these mountains, McNeill argued that while their deep history shows human activities did not degrade the Mediterranean mountain environment, industrialization marked an irreversible ecological decline visible through deforestation, soil erosion, and depopulation. Later, the geographer and climatologist Alfred T. Grove paired with the environmental historian Oliver Rackham and objected to McNeill that “degradation” had been a common but false rhetorical trope since early discussio ns of the Mediterranean region (Grove and Rackham 2003). Diana K. Davis (2018) pointed toward more recent origins of the idea of dryness as degradation in French and German colonialism in North Africa. Regional Geopolitics, French Geography, and Climatology in “Dry Spain,”…3 In this chapter, we contribute to the historicization of the Mediterranean region as an object of geographic and historiographic analysis. We argue that the notion of a “Mediterranean climate” characterized by dryness partly stems from early modern northern European imperial interests in the region. We do so by looking at Braudel’s far precedents in France: the seventeenthand eighteenth-century advocates of French expansionism toward the south who bound together what they perceived as the Spanish landscape with the idleness of its peoples. From the early nineteenth century onward, French botanists and geographers working within French imperialism in North Africa develo ped two new and interconnected concepts: the Mediterranean region and the Mediterranean climate. In 1826, Napoleon’s captain and botanist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent applied these concepts back to Spain, identifying much of this country as having a Mediterranean climate. Our thesis is that unveiling its early modern precedents sheds new light both on the history and the structure of the concept of the “Mediterranean climate,” which is still debated today by climatologists largely unaware of its political origins. We argue that the nineteenth-century identification of the early modern idea of a “dry Spain” with the new concept of “Mediterranean climate” is one of the sources of the sustained (and largely contested) characterization of the Mediterranean climate with aridity. Other factors have contr ibuted to defining the Mediterranean region—among others, diet, anthropology, and art. However, the emergence of climatology in the early nineteenth century was a key development in the formation of this concept. 1 Within this discipline, the Mediterranean region be came identified with a climatic zone characterized by summer droughts (Ruel 1991). There are surely sources other than early climatology for the idea o f the Mediterranean climate as an arid. After all, Ancient philosopher Plato already lamented what he perceived as the decline of Greek soil (Grove and Rackham 2003: 288). 2 Likely, further histories of the concept 1 In his isotherm map, Alexander von Humboldt was the first to divide the planet into different climatic regions according to its temperature, improving the classical, traditional division distinguishing between the torrid, temperate, and frigid zones (Klein 2018). 2 We thank Paul Edwards for bringing this point to our attention. of the Mediterranean climate should take into account developments in Greece and Italy, as well as the British and German scientific and political relationships with the Ottoman empire, the middle East, and North Africa. We think, however, that focusing on the Mediterranean increasing role in defining “dry Spain” illuminates some unknown precedents of the French geographic tradition, whose import in the historiography of the Medi terranean region is widely recognized . 4 A. Celis and L. Camprubí There are important studies on the origins of the association of the Mediterranean region with a characteristic climate. According to these works, the “scientific invention of the Mediterranean” was the job of early nineteenth-century imperial French human geography and biogeo graphy developed by Élisée Reclus and others (Ruel 1991; Deprest 2002). Paul Vidal de la Blache, widely considered the founder of French regional geography, drew on this tradition to establish the presence of a dry summer season as the defining characteristic of the Mediterranean region in his 1886 paper “Des rapports entre les populations et le climat sur les bords européens de la Méditerranée.” Vidal de la Blache emphasized how the Mediterranean climate profoundly influenced the character and way of life of the people inhabiting these areas (Claval 1988). Fernand Braudel emphatically embraced Vidal de la Blache’s regional take on the Mediterranean. In his 1949 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel pointed to “Drought: [as] the scourge of the Mediterranean” (Braudel 1975: 238). Characterizing the Mediterranean climate as dry enabled Braudel to situate the regional environment as an active stage, partly shaping human history. Later environmental approaches to Mediterranean history have had Braudel’s notion of a shared climate defining a common region (Greene 2017). And yet, as the later section of this chapter shows, there is nothing self-evident about the idea of the Mediterranean region as a dry one. New definitions of the “Mediterranean climate” point to autumn and winter rainfall as the specific characteristics of the Mediterranean region. The Mediterranean Sea now emerges as a main driver of the Mediterranean climate through cyclone genesis. (Re)situating the Sea at the center of the Mediterranean has opened new questions about the unity of the region, stressing subregional systems of equal atmospheric pressure and dynamics. The question we ask can thus be reframed: Why did definitions of the Mediterranean climate erase the Mediterranean Sea for so long? The notion of the Mediterranean region, we show, has a long political history linked to French and Spanish plans of transformation of the Spanish landscape through engineering works directed to tame a wild nature and culture. The next two sections turn to those plans and their associated notions of aridity. 2 Spanish and French “Climate theory”: Between the Decline of the Habsburgs and the Rise of the Bourbons The personification of a dry Spain has long been a prominent literary motif. Take, for instance, Cervantes’ Don Quix ote, nicknamed “de La Mancha” after the largest arid plain in the Iberian Peninsula. French travelers who arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in the seventeenth century took up this trope, often comparing the dryness of the southern landscape to the green they were used to at home. In both cases, the insistence on aridity reflected the concern for the decline of the Spanish Empir e. This section tracks the origins of this idea through Spanish and French sources, emphasizing its changing social and political interpretations, including “climate theory”—which held that climate determines the character of a population. While often used interchangeably by the actors, in what follows we try to reserve “aridity” for references to bioclimatic conditions and grant “dryness” a broader reach, including the effects of human inaction (lack of public works) and action (deforestation). Regional Geopolitics, French Geography, and Climatology in “Dry Spain,”…5 In 1599, Jesuit Scholastic and historian Juan de Mariana discussed the problem of drought and how to counter it. He advocated policies of reforestation and irrigation of fields as measures for economic improvement and public health, “so as to reduce the air’s dryness.” Modifying the climate might be possible with the arrival of more precipitation thanks to the evaporation of water from the canals (Mariana [1599] 1845: 347). Drought and hydraulic works were becoming common themes among Spanish thinkers. In 1627, for instance, economic thinker Caxa de Leruela voiced a complaint by Castilian farmers about the lack of irrigation projects, pointing out that, meanwhile, the Spanish Crown spent large sums of money on the construction of artificial lakes in Flanders (Caxa de Leruela 1627: 18– 19). The debate focused on who should undert ake these hydraulic works. In the sixteenth century, Spanish economic thought favored private initiative over state intervention in agriculture (Fernández Álvarez 2014). Along the seventeenth century, however, demand for the king’s intervention increased (Fernández Delgado 2003). The call for larger state intervention in the economy characterized the so-called “arbitristas.” This group of thinkers plead for reforms that would strengthen the king’s power in the economy, particularly by promoting field irrigation and reforestation (Hermann 1989). Only in this way, they argued, could the crown prevent the depopulation of territories, which they associa ted to decline and lack of revenue. They peppered their writing with words like aridity, sterility, and scarcity (Lorenzo 2014: 83). In a time of imperial decline, arbitristas advanced internal colonization as a response to the metropole’s lack of population. Those political ideas coincided with a growing interest in climate change among early modern European thinkers and governments (Parker 2013). The need to alter climatic conditions to boost agricultural production and improve the quality of life for the population was a de fining feature of rulers’ actions in the Early Modern age. This approach is what some authors have termed “climate theory”: the argument that the climate could determine both the wealth and the character of nations (Morgan and Miglietti 2017). A late exponent was Charles de Montesquieu. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), he explored how climate influenced the character and customs of people in different regions, including Spain. According to this French political philosopher, the intense heat in southern European countries, like Spain, affected the temperament a nd behavior of its inhabitants. Montesquieu believed that heat made people more passive, less industrious, and more prone to laziness or leisure. He considered that warm climates fostered an inclination toward a contemplative or reflective life, in contrast to the colder climates of northern Europe, which, in his view, encouraged hard work, constant activity, and greater physical strength (Montesquieu 1748: 300). 6 A. Celis and L. Camprubí Earlier authors were often less fatalistic: Climates do determine national characters, but humans can affect climates. While these ideas commonly referred to heat, they often extended to dryness, its human-made causes, and how to counter them. In France, the idea that the government could improve the climate to improve the nation took hold through several important public works. Raphaël Morera referred to the drainage and agricultural transformation of wetlands as “governing with the environment,” creating “microclimates” conducive to the growth of the French population. After the ascension to the throne of Henry IV of France in 1589, transforming a “desertic and uninhabited country “ became a fundamental objective to the crown (Morera 2017). The house of Bourbon also framed drainage of wetlands as a legitimizing exercise of good governance. Soon, French travelers began to apply these ideas to Spain, often drawing on the abovementioned Spanish sources and often on their own experience and political interests. In 1655, as Antoine Brunel approached the border after a long travel around to Spain, he compared both countries: Without exaggeration or hyperbole, I concluded that, in one place, Judgment Day would have little to destroy, while in the other, the flames that will mark the end of the world would be the last to extinguish. It seemed as though fire had already fallen from the sky in the former, leaving the land half-baked, while in the latter, only a pleasant and life-giving warmth was received. (Brunel 1666: 320–321) A few days earlier in Pamplona, located in northern Spain near the French border, he had already distinguished the Navarrese from other Spaniards based on geographical characteristics: We observed that, as we gradually moved away from the dryness of Castile and the austerity of Aragon, we arrived in a more sociable country, with greater communication among its inhabitants, as well as with those who were merely passing through. (313) He and other French travelers compared the succes ses achieved in France under the Bourbon dynasty in producing Morera’s “microclimates” to what they perceived as Spanish inaction and even active destruction through deforestation. The political motivation behind some of these negative views was the war between the kings of France and Spain. Brunel’s more positive views on Navarre, for instance, were perhaps linked to the fact that Henry IV, the first Bourbon to reign in France (1589–1610), had also been king of Navarre. The discourse of climate theory and aridity could nonetheless be adapted to new political situations. In 1669, some decades after his compatriot Brunel, François Bertaut also described a depopulated and barren country: Spaniards were to blame for the depopulated dryness of the Castilian land, because with their laziness and pride they refus ed to cultivate it. “The disordered behaviour of its men and women starts from childhood,” Bertaut argued in the tone of climate theorists, “resulting in less kids being born and those born not being as vigorous as in colder and more moderate countries” (Bertaut 1669: 274). He left, however, ample room for hope regarding Spain’s economic prospects. The two countries had now signed the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), and Bertaut traveled to Spain together with King Louis XIV’s ambassador to reinforce that alliance. He thus had grounds to be more optimistic than Brunel had been. But canalization and reforestation could recover an allegedly lost wealth. Discussing the example of the Islamic hydraulic works in Granada, “where the water flows through small canals like those that irrigate the lands in France over the meadows,” he proposed “that if the Spaniards were willing to do the same everywhere, this would be the most fertile country in Europe” (276). Heavy taxes imposed by a corrupt dynasty, Bertaut concluded making his political case, were the only obstacle to these reforming prospects. Regional Geopolitics, French Geography, and Climatology in “Dry Spain,”…7 The idea of a dry Spain was thus not only linked to the aridity of its climate but also to the perceived laziness of its inhabitants (Schaub 2003: 211). Some authors argued that the heat determined this behavior, as supported by “climate theory,” but some others emphasized that indol ence and bad government hindered the reforms that were necessary to address the dryness caused by the climate and the resulting depopulation. In both cases, aridity became the hallmark of the Spanish and a powerful image to explain the loss of imperial hegemony. These ideas played a pivotal role in the broader diplomatic strategy of the French Bourbons in Spain. As Charles II of Spain had no heir, the French Bourbons devised plans to replace the Habsburg dynasty as rulers of Spain (Schaub 2003: 337). Louis XIV’s diplomats, travelers, and ambassadors promoted a propagandistic view of the overall poor state of the Spanish monarchy compa red to a France prospering thanks to political and techni cal reforms. The connection between decline and dryness came to the front of the political discourse. Cardinal Pierre de Bonzi, Louis XIV’s ambassador to Spain, wrote to his king in 1679 that the Spanish would rather drown themselves than build canals or divert water (Alvarez López 2008: 273). This, of course, contrasted with important works by Spanish engineers and technicians both in Spain and in the Ameri cas (Lucena Giraldo and Fernández-Armesto 2022). But the narrative of idleness and the need for transformative projects became the usual legitimization for the French king’s political ambitions. A group of courtiers consolidated in Madrid who associated good governance with the reforms implemented in France (Alvarez López 2008: 114). When the Bourbon dynasty finally seized power in 1700 with Philipp V, they moved to implement some of the promised reforms. Philip V found in his grandfather Louis XIVof France not only a model of good governance but also a roadmap for executing his policies. The king Louis XIV sent Jean Orry to Spain to assist his grandson in building an absolutist crown there (Dubet 2008). Increasing tax revenue was a first step. Orry noted that depopulation was an essential obstacle for this. The king recei ved absolutely nothing from “waters and forests,” he complained, while the extension of “uninhabitable Spain” kept increasing. 3 Orry’s model soon became the 1669 Ordonnance sur les Eaux et Forêts, promoted by Louis XIV’s minister 3 Archives diplomatiques du ministère des affaires étrangères, Moyens de remédier à l’état présent des affaires du Roy d ’Espagne… CPE 119, p. 132–213 Colbert. Mimicking its emphasis on state control over natural resources, Orry advocated for the role of the intendant as a territorial representative of the king to implement reforms. 4 Finally, in 1718, an ordinance was approved for the creation of intendants, whose responsibi lities included river canalization, the use of underground waters, and reforestation. 5 However, the Bourbons war of succession against the Habsburgs left little room for these hydraulic works to materialize. 8 A. Celis and L. Camprubí Philipp’s son, Ferdinand VI, became king in 1746 and, short after, init iated an interventionist policy aimed to end aridity and depopulation. His most powerful minister led the reform: The Marquis of Ensenada. Ensenada had managed to gain the king’s trust through a series of letters known as “representations” (Delgado Barrado 2002). The most famous is the one written in 1751, where he associated “bad government” with d ry Spain and “good government” with what was accomplished by Louis XIV: There is no land in Europe drier than Spain (...) its rivers have not been made navigable to the extent possible, nor are there canals for irrigation and transportation (...) if in his territory the great Louis XIVordered rules and regulations that were followed and continued, why can’t they adopt and practice the same in Spain while you are the king? (Rodríguez Vill a 1878: 47–48 ) Ensenada’s government was the first to design an ambitious hydraulic plan aimed at transforming the territory, anticipating the hydraulic policy followed during the second half of the eighteenth century (Gil Olcina 1992: 174): The Castile Can al or the Imperial Canal of Aragon, as well as the d rainage of lagoons and meadows to create new arable land, received a definitive boost at that time with the desire to turn dry Spain into the stronghold of the Spanish empire. 3 Equating “dry Spain” to the “Mediterranean region” from French Imperialism to Spanish Regenerati onism Napoleon’s botanists and geographers introduced the scientific concept of a Mediterranean region as a natural unit of analysis. They did so in the context of imperial travels to Egypt and attempts at settling colonies in North Africa. While this story is somewhat known, the role of these same geographers in Spain has been largely overlooked. In this section, we argue that, in the nineteenth century, French geographers reinterpreted the old concept of “dry Spain” through the newly coined “Mediterranean climate.” They did so, moreover, in a context of political and physical transformation of the Spanish landscape which would then continue in the Spanish tradition of engineering, regenerationism, and climate studies. 4 Ibidem, p. 213 5 Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. Ordenanza de 4 de Julio de 1718 para el establecimiento é instruccion de Intendentes, y para Tesorero General, Pagadores y Contadores de los Ejercitos y Provincias, p. 47–48. http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000219669&page=1 Regional Geopolitics, French Geography, and Climatology in “Dry Spain,”…9 After the defeat of Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleonic France focused on continental domination. One of Napoleon’s dragons, Captain of the fifth Cavalry Regiment Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, played a prominent role in the identification of dry Spain with the Mediterranean region. Bory had received training as a naturalist and geographer in his youth from the disciple of Count Buffon, Bernard Germai n Lacépède, and went on to become a prominent botanist and to participate in some of the French scientific expeditions in overseas provinces (Álvarez and Quirós Linares 2004). There, he was among the proponents of the new concept of a Mediterranean region unified by unique vegetation characteristics (Davis 2018). Moreover, he identified this Mediterranean region with the “Mediterranean climate,” characterized by heat (Bory de Saint-Vincent 1826: 46). Bory, however, did not only blame the natural climate for an arid soil and vegetation. He and others adopted a discourse of decay caused by human activity, which became a legitimating common place following the French conques t of Algeria in 1830 (Davis 2018: 131). We want to argue that Bory de Saint-Vincent’s Mediterranean Spain served as a significant precursor to a narrative which he helped create as a member of French scientific expeditions in Algeria. In 1808, Bory entered Spain with the Grande Armée, where he ca rried out various tasks of geographical reconnaissance, accumulating important information. This work formed the basis of his later works, including “Résumé géographique de la Péninsule Ibérique” (1826) where he fir st divided the Iberian Peninsula, including a cartographic representation (577), into two large regions differentiated by their “natural climate”: the European region, also known as the Oceanic or temperate region, and the Mediterranean region, referred to as the African or hot region (74–76). The idea of a “dry Spain” reemerged in his writings as a powerful rhetorical device to support this classification. This idea retained all the previous political connotations, including the idealization of a remote fertile past which would have been degraded by idle rulers an d people: Thus, this once fertile land, darkened by the lack of trees and devoured by the intensity of a sun whose heat no foliage tempers, has gradually seen its springs dry up, its lagoons disappear, and its streams run dry. At every step, one encounters dry basins and valleys that must have once been irrigated but where, with every element of freshness now gone, the soil can produce only a sombre dust that the wind scatters in suffocating whirlwinds through a scorching atmosphere. (70) Echoing commonplaces of seventeenth-century French travelers, Bory linked the aridity of Spain to backwardness, desolation, and the ignorance of taciturn and proud Spaniards. Only the wettest Sp ain, full of joy and intelligence, escaped this curse (67–70). Bory de Saint-Vincent would return, as in the sevent eenth century, to the ruined Arab hydraulic past to point out the lack of hydraulic infrastructure. A good example was the Guadalquivir River, navigable up to Cordoba during Muslim rule and cut from it from the reign of Emperor Charles Vonward. According to Bory, the French marshal Soult achieved to reopen this connection “in less than four months” during the Napoleonic Wars (90). facilitated the Allied landing in Normandy, depicted the Mediterranean Sea as a significant global cyclone g enesis area (L ionello et al. 2006: 328). The key was to distinguish cyclones formed in the sea from others with a different origin. A new breakthrough came from Yugoslavia, the other side of the Iron Curtain. In the 1960s, Djuro Radinović (1965) identified subregional areas where cyclone genesis occurred, such as the Gulf of Genoa and the Aegean Sea. These cyclones resulted from differences in sea and atmospheric temperatures: The Mediterranean Sea acted as a source of latent heat that favored cyclone formation. 16 A. Celis and L. Camprubí The existence of an inland sea that favored the formation of local cyclones gradually came to define the “Mediterranean climate” in different disciplines. French geographers, for instance, bega n to use atmospheric pressure and weather maps as reference points in the 1950s (Billaut et al. 1956). This, in turn, led to a greater emphasis on regional differences within the Mediterranean region. The uniform character provided by the existence of a dry season in summer gave way to high complexity of the different atmospheric patterns converging in the Mediterranean basin (Lionello et al. 2006). To be sure, older approaches to the Mediterranean region coexisted with the new climatic one. French botanist and phytogeographer Louis Emberger produce d in 1962 the first Bioclimatic Map of the Mediterranean Zone as part of UNESCO’s Arid Zone Program (Davis 2018: 139). Inspired by Emb erger’s work, in 1983 the Spanish geobotanist Salvador Rivas Martínez defined “Mediterranean Spain” through a climatic index based on the presence or absence of summer drought (Rivas-Martínez 1983). He concluded that practically the entire territory pertained to the Mediterranean region, including inland areas and coastal areas bathed by the Atlantic Ocean (Fig. 1c). Today, Rivas Martínez’s index remains the main reference in Spanish geography for deli neating the country’s two main natural regions: the Mediterranean and the Eurosiberian. 7 In the late twentieth century, however, different groups of meteorologists focuse d their efforts on linking rainfall on the Mediterranean coast with these cyclones. Subregional differences gained increasing relevance as the dynamics of the Mediterranean Oscillation (MO) became the focus of study (Martin-Vide and LopezBustins 2006: 1456). The MO refers to differences in surface atmospheric pressure configurations over long periods: An anticyclone in the western Mediterranean and Iberia opposes the low er pressures of the eastern Mediterranean. Scientists further emphasized subregional differences by studying more local pressure gradients. Understanding these regional and subregional dynamics provided a better understanding of rainfall patterns in the Mediterranean basin. For instance, the climatology group at the University of Barcelona created the Western Mediterranean Oscillation index (WEMOi) (Martin-Vide and Lopez-Bustins 2006). The index showed that the compl ex orography surrounding the Mediterranean isolates it from northern hemisphere atmospheric dynamics, giving it unique climatic characteristics 7 “Atlas Nacional de España, Instituto Geográfico Nacional,” accessed March 1, 2024, https://www. ign.es/web/ane-area-ane due to local factors. These unique characteristics would explain rainfall and drought patterns. For Spain, between 1910 and 2000, winter precipitation on the eastern slope of the Iberian Peninsula, especially in the Gulf of Valencia, significantly increased with negative WeMOi values. These correlations led to a new regionalization of the Iberian territory: Only the eastern coast received most of its precipitation from the Mediterranean Sea, much of it in the form of torrential rains, while the rest depended on the Atlantic Ocea n (Fig. 1d). Regional Geopolitics, French Geography, and Climatology in “Dry Spain,”…17 In the lapse of a century, attention shifted from the Mediterranean’s dry season to its rainy season. The Spanish geographer Antonio Gil Olcina (2007) argued that a dry season in summer is typical of all temperate dry-season climates. What is specific to the Mediterranean climate is the presence of an inland sea that determines precipitation in coastal areas. With insight, it seems that, paradoxically, older definitions of the Mediterranean climate through drought were overlooking the geographical feature that gives the region its name: the Mediterranean Sea! Introducing sea-atmospheric interactions in a dynamic system led to a redefinition of the Mediterranean climate and of the areas under its climatic influence. For instance, “dry Spain” and the Spanish steppes no longer fall into the “Mediterranean” area of influence in current indexes and maps. Figu re 1 captures the historicity of the reach of the Mediterranean climate in the Iberian Peninsula by applying current rainfall data to the divergent indexes defined by conflicting definitions of the Mediterranean climate. 5 Conclusion As defined by the reach of the Mediterranean climate, the Mediterranean region is historical in at least two senses. First, the indexes used to define it have changed through time. For us, this historicity opens the door for cultural and political explanations of the changing definitions. In particular, we have argued that a longstanding concern about drought in Spain was a key source for early modern ideas of climatic influence on human behavior and for modern associations of the Mediterranean region to a dry climate. We have shown how, through time, these ideas were politically situated in imperial disputes and reform plans. According to historian Diana K. Davis, some of the main assumptions of Emberger Mediterranean map for UNESCO were deeply rooted in French colonial perceptions of a degraded North African landscape. We hope to have shown that Rivas’ Mediterranean index was no less rooted than Emberger’s in imperial struggles and political projects of landscape transformation. The old characterization of Spain as a dry and backward country has been one of the sources of definitions of the Mediterranean region as characterized by a dry climate. A more recent example is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which references Köppen’s climatic classification to define the Mediterranean region by the presence of a dry season in summer. 8 8 “Mediterranean Region, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” accessed April 14, 2024, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_CCP4.pdf This characterization has even been extended to define the climate of areas far from the Mediterranean, such as California, Chile, South Africa, and Australia. This detachment of the notion of the Mediterranean climate from the specificities of the Mediterranean Sea is increasingly contested. As the devastating floods in Valencia in October 2024 show, Mediterranean regions in Eastern Spain suffer intense rainfall produced by the intersection of isolated masses of cold air left behind by the polar jet stream and warm and humid masses of air coming from the Mediterranean sea—what Spanish scientists called DANA and German ones Kaltlufttropfen, cold drop. As the Mediterranean climate changes, recognizing the changes to the very notion of “the Mediterranean climate” becomes more urgent. As Fig. 1 illustrates, regional mappings of the Mediterranean influence in the Spanish climate are historical and contested. This demonstrates that scientific definitions of the Mediterranean region had also extrascientific sources. They were part of larger political and geopolitical conflicts, often with enduring and invisible legacies. 18 A. Celis and L. 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