A 1980 survey of the soils irrigable by the 18th century-planned Tamarite Canal, NE Spain

Description

The Tamarite Canal, NE Spain, was a long-standing demand of the municipalities of La Litera region, plus some conterminous areas. At our knowledge, the oldest documented demand was issued in 1772 by the municipalities of Binéfar and Tamarite (Isábal, 2022). The architect Manuel Inchauste did the terrain reconnaissance for establishing the trace of the Canal and its feasibility, issuing his report in July 1783. Later, in order to allow a new administrative concession (Mateu, 2015, page 270), the name of the Canal was changed to Canal de Aragón y Cataluña (CAyC) by the Ministerio de Fomento (1876). We recover a study on the soils irrigated by the CAyC carried out by the now extinct company RENASA, based in Madrid. The report is dated April 1981, which means that the data were gathered in 1980 or earlier. Such study offers a unique snapshot of these irrigated lands. The materials recovered by us up to today are: 1) the report in Spanish with the pages 29 and 30 partially damaged, 2) a draft version in English of the same report, 3) the excel file "CAyC analyses01.xlsx" containing 3502 analytical data copied manually by us from the report, and 4) five pdf files for the plans included in the report. As a witness of the introduction and operation of sprinkling devices at CAyC, we reproduce the report written by F. de losRíos (1967), chief engineer of Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC). References: - Ministerio de Fomento. 1876. Royal Decree published in Gaceta de Madrid 323(IV): 427-428. https://www.boe.es/diario_gazeta/ - Isábal, S. 2022. El documento más antiguo de la historia del Canal de Aragón y Cataluña. Littera 7: 9-24. https://www.cellit.es/wp-content/uploads/littera-digital/littera07/littera07-articulos/littera07-009-isabal.pdf - Mateu González, J.J. 2015. El canal de Aragón y Cataluña: gestación, construcción y puesta en explotación (1782-1940). http://hdl.handle.net/10803/380552

Steps to reproduce

Scanning vintage documents to .pdf files, manually copying numerical data into Excel files.

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