Valencians

The Valencian naturalist Antonio José Cabanillas recognised that the narrow gorge would make an ideal place for a dam.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the project was revived as a way of providing irrigation water to the agricultural plains around La Rectoria and Denia, particularly after the phylloxera crisis damaged the traditional raisin industry, as I talked about in the previous podcast entitled Valencians to New York.

The proposed irrigation scheme was ambitious.

The original irrigators' community envisaged supplying roughly 10,000 hectares.