Since the fall of Moorish dominion, the population of Andalucia has fallen to less than half; large areas which in Moorish days were smiling corn-lands, to-day lie barren and unproductive, choked with brushwood—the great southern despoblados, or deserts.
Nearly one-half the entire land of Spain (to be exact, 45·8 per cent.) is without cultivation of any kind; and of the rest, the productive powers are but half utilized. The yield of the best land in a favourable season rarely reaches forty bushels per acre, and the average, taking one year with another, may be placed at twenty; while in Northumberland thirty bushels is an average, and fifty a not infrequent yield.
The three chief agricultural products of Spain are corn, oil, and wine—of the latter, we treat more particularly in another chapter. The corn-farms—each usually including a certain proportion of olive-wood—extend from four or five hundred acres up to large holdings of as many thousand; and, as a rule, are cultivated by their non-resident owners, through a steward.[46]
Even in the case of rented land, the farmer seldom himself lives on his holding, but entrusts the management to an agent, while he resides in his town house. Neither landowner nor farmer live in the country.
This deep-rooted antipathy to a country-life is one of the many causes of the decrepitude of Spanish agriculture, among which may be specified the following:—
1.—The custom of absenteeism.
2.—The antiquated system of tillage.
3.—The absence of woods and plantations, the beneficial effects of which on climate and atmosphere are specially necessary in this hot, dry country. The comparatively small forest-areas are, in many parts, as previously stated, being rapidly reduced by the hatchet of the charcoal-burner.
4.—The neglect of irrigation. In wet winters, the low-lying lands are flooded, and the whole country is water-logged; in summer the reverse is the case—moisture is non-existent, every green thing is burnt up, yet no attempt is made to direct and conserve the rain-supplies, albeit the remains of the aqueducts and irrigation-works of Roman and Moor are ever present to suggest the silent lesson of former foresight and prosperity.