As I planned to explore the swamps in the north of the country, I took the advice of the doctor at the Clínica de Malalties Tropicals in Drassanes and dosed myself on the prescribed cocktail of anti-malarial drugs. All part of the price for visiting exotic lands. However, a hundred years ago, a tourist visiting many European cities might well have been given the same recommendation had such treatments existed, for malaria was rife in the Old Continent. In Barcelona, paludisme, as it’s called in Catalan, was considered the most pressing public health problem at the start of the 20th century. Indeed, one could imagine a hypothetical Lonely Planet Guide to Barcelona published, say, in 1903 warning visitors not only about the ongoing battle between anarchist hitmen, police shoot-to-kill squads and hired thugs, but also to take doxycycline and not to dream of sleeping without a mosquito net, particularly in the old city.
It is thought that malaria spread north from its ancestral African enclaves with the Neolithic revolution between 8,000 and 10,000 BCE. Sedentary village life, land clearance, irrigation and the increase in the human population all helped it along. New strands of resistant parasites would have been brought by the waves of invadors who swept across the Iberian Peninsula. We know for example that malaria followed Hannibal in his wake.
By the Middle Ages, the nobility had gained control of the best wetlands, where they could hunt and earn lucrative profits by exploiting their natural resources (everything from rice cultivation to leech farming). However, these advantages were offset by the fear of marshes as breeding grounds of plagues and incurable fevers. Until the connection between malaria and mosquitoes was understood in the late 1800s, the disease was thought to be borne by foul air (mal aria in Latin) emanating from such damp places. Such was the dread of these wetlands that a royal decree was passed in 11th-century Valencia sentencing any farmer to death who planted rice too close to villages and towns. Indeed, some marshes such as Doñana in Andalucia, today one of Europe’s largest remaining wetlands, were precisely saved in part due to the presence of malarial mosquitoes.
The marshes of Catalunya were also afflicted and there was much opposition to rice farming due to its connection with the disease. A popular 19th-century saying in L’Empordà warned against marriage to rice farmers, particularly those from the village of Viladamat in the heart of the Aiguamolls wetlands, in the far north-east of Catalunya, which was particularly afflicted:
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