Valencia's irrigation system is now a model for sustainable farming

Probably for good reason. Manually dug irrigation trenches are back-breaking labor.

The Delos headquarters in Westworld were filmed there (third season).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5CT0DdenVU

There's actually 3 :D Umbracle, the one that exists open air under the awnings is great in the summer time air. It only runs during the warmer months as the locals can't stand the 20C night temperature.

Valen-bici is super convenient, they are pretty heavy steel framed machines but everythings flat so it's not a great bother.

The real gem is the extensive bike lanes that stretch upwards of 20km out from the city. Every main road has a bike lane. Electric scooters were the real ticket and I had one while I was there. ALmost went a year carbon free transport.

For me it felt like something built for cars - while driving past it in a car or looking at it from a hotel skybar its breathtaking, but the more you get close the less interesting it becomes.

I remember taking a look at Gaudy’s architectural masterpieces in Barcelona - those were much more inspirational for me as they were more fractal in nature, the more you got close the more you could discover, the guy designed the outside look down to the doorhandles on the interior doors. It was a endless maze of detail, which looked very futuristic from a distance too.

I’d liken Gaudy to Steve’s Jobs where he _had_ to control all the details. Whereas Valencia’s ciudad de las artes to something designed by a committee - amazing for its purpose, but not much beyond that.

Every locale should be responsible for its own food security. As each locale is different, there is no universal solution. Each locale will need to be resourceful and adapt according to its own climate and what resources are available in its vicinity.

Sadly, some locales are unprepared for food self-sustainability, and the denizens of these places will have to find a way to adapt eventually, whether by will or climatic/geo-political event. Better sooner than too late.

But there are different standards. Open waterways meet other standards of "better."

The area being serviced isn't massive and the chanels are narrow and quite deep.

So on the one hand, it's a huge problem, but on the other, it's not.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00693-8

Agriculture in that region is also depleting the major aquifer faster than it can be recharged through rain. Not the best example of sustainable irrigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#Accelerated_d...

Interestingly Mercadona has also started making prepared meals, which is a nice keep-up-with-the-times upgrade IMHO, nowadays that young people cook less and less.

The city I was raised at used to be a big Muslim city. When they dig the foundations for new buildings, they often get disrupted by muslim ruins, which might need to be protected/removed carefully. And if they dig deeper (say, for a subterranean parking) they may find ancient Roman ruins.

In the western world ancient Rome tends to be put in a good light; as "the civilisation" against "the barbarians". However, ancient Romans were very ardent and violent colonizers ("colonia" is after all a Roman word). They took slaves, and women could not vote or hold political office. They stayed in the Iberian peninsula for 700 years.

The Arab muslims that followed them were only faster on their initial conquest: In around 3 years, they had full control of everything. They lasted 800 years, until the Emirate of Granada, their last bastion, was conquered. But by that point they had been in decline for 4 centuries, gradually being conquered by the Christians or being consumed by inner-fighting.

While I am sure there was some influence (there are still lots Arab words in modern Spanish, after all) after 4 centuries of almost continuous but gradual conquer, I doubt the conquistadors were "emulating" the Arabs. I think they were "used to a life of war and conquer", by that point. So they just kept going. If they were able to "emulate" the Arabian conquests they would be emulating people from 400 years prior, and at that point they might as well be emulating the ancient Romans.

Women have always farmed here. Always.

Fishing in l'Albufera (the "lake" outside Valencia) was limited to men for a long time but there's a reason for that.

Same reason may other jobs and activities have been mean-only in many parts of the world, forever.

Survival of the species.

Men are expendable. Women are not.

Without children, civilizations perish. Women can have babies, men cannot. In order to protect them from danger, women have traditionally taken the most dangerous and exhausting jobs. Plain and simple. Go check all that heteropatriachate and woke arguments with that lens, you'll see how the actual reason of most of the men-only stuff is protection of women, which made a lot of sense until relatively recently because a sick or hurt woman was a dead woman because medicine was primitive. And this is and has been true for all of the world, even today in many regions in Africa, Asia and South America.