Calle San José and the Huerta de Alicante

The Huerta de Alicante is an alluvial plain of around 3,800 hectares north-east of Alicante, covering Alicante, Mutxamel, Sant Joan d'Alacant and El Campello. Its origins go back at least to the Islamic period, and its territorial structure has been shaped over more than nine centuries by three elements: settlements, paths and the irrigation system.

The Tibi Dam (1580–1594), one of the oldest hydraulic engineering works in Europe still standing, transformed the Huerta by allowing the regulation of the Montnegre river. From the reservoir, water is distributed by eleven channels, the main one being the Acequia Mayor or del Consell, which crosses the entire Huerta. From it 22 arms and dozens of secondary channels (hijuelas) water every plot.

Precisely one of those secondary channels —the Hijuela de Mingot— runs beneath the plot at Quijote 12, the epicentre of Modification 25. The hydraulic infrastructure that has watered the Huerta since the 16th century literally crosses the very land they want to amend.

Before being called Sant Joan, our town was known as Benialí or Benalí, a place name of Islamic origin that was kept until 1244, when the lands were taken by the future king Alfonso X the Wise. The original mosque was consecrated to Saint John the Baptist, and the name spread to the whole town.

On the Heredad de Benalí estate stood a defensive tower of the same name and its annex chapel of San José. Both the tower and the chapel are visible in an estate plan dated 1751. The chapel, the last vestige of the estate, was demolished in 1968.

This document, published by the Town Hall of Sant Joan d'Alacant itself, confirms that Calle San José is the founding heart of the municipality. The historic plan clearly shows the Tower of Benialí next to the reference «S. Joseph», proving that the street and its surroundings predate even the current name of the town.

Sant Joan d'Alacant is one of the road-side towns of the Huerta, born along the main communication routes and crossroads. Its founding core developed from the church and a small hamlet arranged along the paths, like Calle San José.

The first dwellings of what is today Calle San José were built around ~1510, in full expansion of the Huerta after the construction of the Tibi Dam. The street predates the publication of Don Quixote (1605) and the expulsion of the Moriscos (1609), and its first graphic representation dates from 1696.

The neighbours of this street were, for centuries, the farmers and craftsmen who worked the immediate Huerta plots: they grew vines, almonds, carobs and fruit trees. They were the hands that kept the irrigation system, channels and arms alive. Calle San José is not an urban accident: it is the very origin of the municipality.

The Huerta de Alicante was historically famous for its vineyards. Already in the 17th century, the chronicler Bendicho highlights vine cultivation as one of the most notable productions, even noting the replacement of olive groves with vineyards because of higher profitability.

From these vineyards came Fondillón, an oxidative-aged wine made from over-ripened Monastrell grapes, regarded as one of the great historic wines of Europe. Appreciated at the courts of Louis XIV of France, mentioned by Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo and exported throughout Europe, Fondillón was the pride of the Alicante Huerta.

The cellars of the Torres de la Huerta —many of them declared Cultural Heritage Assets— were the place where this wine was produced. The neighbours of Calle San José, as Huerta farmers, took part for generations in the vine growing and wine production that gave international fame to these lands.

The Towers of the Huerta still stand: 16th-century defensive constructions raised against attacks by Berber pirates. These towers, declared Cultural Heritage Assets, are intimately tied to agricultural use: next to each tower stood a dwelling with an oil mill and a wine cellar.

The municipality of Sant Joan d'Alacant has 4 BIC and 15 BRL in its heritage catalogue. In the entire Huerta there are 150 catalogued buildings, of which 56 are BIC or BRL. This means that in an area representing barely 1.2% of the territory of the four municipalities, 45% of their highest-value heritage assets are concentrated.

This aerial photograph from the «American Flight» of 1956 shows the landscape of the Huerta de Alicante before the rise of urban developmentalism. The agricultural plot structure, rural paths, channels and scattered trees —almonds, carobs and vineyards— that defined the territory for centuries can be clearly seen.

In this image one can observe how the urban core of Sant Joan d'Alacant was still a small hamlet surrounded by cultivated fields, with Calle San José as the backbone of the town. The contrast with the current situation —where concrete has replaced the fields— is the best proof of what academic research describes as an «unprecedented transformation» of the cultural landscape.

The Huerta's irrigation structure is a hydraulic system of medieval origin perfected over centuries. From the weirs of Mutxamel and Sant Joan (both BIC), water is distributed by the Acequia Mayor and the Gualeró, which join just before entering the urban core of Sant Joan d'Alacant.

The 22 arms branching from the main channel water plot by plot the entire Huerta. The paths of water have been, for centuries, also the paths of people: channels and trails interweave forming a network that has structured and ranked the whole territory until the irruption of contemporary urbanism.

As academic research notes, the territorial organisation of the Huerta was for centuries a «slow process respectful with its own past», incorporating previous legacies without abrupt ruptures. That historical continuity was dramatically broken from the 1970s onwards by urban developmentalism.

Partial Modification No. 25 of the Sant Joan PGOU seeks to alter the urban conditions of the Quijote 12 plot, located behind the historic dwellings of Calle San José, in the heart of the Old Town (BRL zone). A plot crossed by the Hijuela de Mingot, part of the 16th-century irrigation system.

While academic research documents that in the Alicante Huerta there has been an «unprecedented transformation that has meant the disappearance of agricultural activity and the degradation of a cultural and heritage landscape of high value», the Sant Joan Town Hall pushes an express urban modification that puts the oldest dwellings of the municipality at risk.