From the patch to the chalets. The social and political use of water in the destruction of an agrarian community. Matadepera (Vallès Occidental), 1931-1983

Abstract

This study shows how the creation of the present-day residential Matadepera is the result of intense political and power struggles whose main axis was the control of the social use of water. The transformation of a small rural village in a residential area for the upper classes was not a spontaneous neither peaceful process, but a social and environmental well-planned project by the big landowners that raised the opposition of a sector of the population. In this process, the struggle for the control of water, an essential resource to transform the dry fields and vineyards in towers with swimming pools, was closely linked to land disputes during the Republic, violently settled by the Civil War. Thus, the lack of civil and political liberties posed by the Franco regime was crucial since it allowed the landlords to base an urban development that, paradoxically, was fully completed once democracy was restored.