Major floods in the City of Murcia through historical documentation: defence measures and socioeconomic context

Abstract

In recent years the study of historical floods has generated methodologies aiming to transform the qualitative information contained in the historical documentation into quantitative information. This coding process seeks to make the way in which societies adapted to floods in the past understandable and comparable in time and space, to extract positive or negative points that can help reduce vulnerability and increase the resilience of today’s societies. The diversity of cultural and historical contexts, as well as the heterogeneity of documentary sources, makes it difficult to extrapolate quantitative methods in historical climatology. This situation favors the fact that hermeneutical analyses of texts continue to be an essential element in the study of the climate of the past. This paper carries out a hermeneutical analysis of the three most catastrophic floods that occurred in the city of Murcia in the last 400 years. We complete this analysis with a quantitative historical cartographic reconstruction. As a main conclusion, Murcian society had strategies for overcoming disasters that involved the whole of society and that advocated comprehensive management of emergencies in particular. However, the state of hardship prior to a flood is a determining factor to explain the resilience capacity of the social system. At the same time, the great increase in exposure to flooded areas in the last two centuries is noteworthy, with progressive occupation of the traditional orchard space for non-agricultural uses that continues today. It is possible to affirm that pre-industrial Murcian society more efficiently used the available mechanisms to adapt to flood events.