Walking through the interior of Toledo’s Santa Cruz Museum now has a new incentive. A botanical itinerary that takes the visitor to Andalusian Toledo, when this cultural center was part of a large palace complex, a few steps from what is known today as Plaza de Zocodover.
The initiative is part of the Islamic Culture Foundation (FUNCI) to make visible and delve into the social and cultural roots of Toledo, “the city with one culture and three religions” says its general secretary Encarna Gutiérrez, beyond the myth of ‘the Three Cultures’ that resonates on many of the tourist routes. “Back then everyone spoke Arabic. It is time for Toledo to assume this important Andalusian heritage as its own and, above all, for the city to feel proud of it. “Al-Andalus began here.”
A total of 14 plants, bushes and trees characteristic of that era are now part of the museum’s cultural heritage. “When you plant something alive, something that grows and that involves recovering heritage, thanks to institutional and citizen collaboration, we are very excited. Plants do not discriminate, they give their fruits and medicinal benefits to all people, of any culture or religion. We have to take care of that heritage because it is unique,” says Encarna Gutiérrez.
This is the objective set by the management of the Santa Cruz Museum. Antonio Dávila believes that it can become “a learning space for visitors” because, he assures, “museums should not be seen as mere containers.”
The plant species are part of this particular exhibition, an itinerary that its promoters have called ‘Sowing heritage: Andalusian botany, in the gardens of the Santa Cruz Museum’, which includes a selection of relevant plant species to better understand the development and experimentation of agronomic disciplines under Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula.
The project is the result of institutional, scientific and citizen collaboration. Together with the promoter of the project, the Islamic Culture Foundation, there are the Museum of Santa Cruz and its association ‘Museo de Santa Cruz ¡Vivo!’, the Torretes Biological Station of the University of Alicante and the Botanical Garden of Castilla-La Stain. And the participation of those who, in their individual capacity, dedicated themselves to the planting day in the days prior to the opening of the botanical itinerary, has been fundamental.
Recover species such as myrtle or Moorish myrtle
The proposal is a different tourist itinerary. Both in its outdoor market and inside, in its noble patio, the visitor is invited to learn more about the taste for vegetables from ten centuries ago.
“All the plants in the Andalusian gardens have been lost and the truth is that they have a historical component,” claims Segundo Ríos, professor of Botany at the University of Alicante and director of its Botanical Garden who has collaborated on the project together with his counterpart in the Botanical Garden of Albacete, Pablo Ferrandis.
“Nothing has remained of those Andalusian gardens, not even in the Alhambra in Granada. We can imagine them, we know what plants they had, but not how they were distributed. Now we have an opportunity to recover some sketches and begin a didactic practice around this culture of which sometimes we have no references.”
You can walk among olive trees, a bitter orange tree, a yew tree, a peach tree, a Damascus rose, violets, rosemary, lavender, lilies, oleanders… and the most striking, a myrtle or Moorish myrtle. It is an evergreen shrub, very long-lived, that over the years can become a small tree. In spring it will have white flowers and then berries. It was always used for decorative but also medicinal purposes, but from the 18th century onwards it practically disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula.
“A large part of its recovery began precisely in the province of Toledo, in El Real de San Vicente. On a private estate, which may have been an old Arab farmhouse, they kept it unknowingly for centuries. We managed to recover material from that single specimen and now there are thousands,” says Segundo Ríos.
This shrub was one of the great protagonists in the writings of Andalusian agronomists and it is more than likely that it populated the gardens of the kingdoms of Taifas, city-states that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula after the decomposition of the Caliphate of Córdoba at the beginning of the 11th century. .
“It was a moment of political weakness and, nevertheless, of great cultural splendor,” explains archaeologist Sergio Isabel, who alludes in particular to the role of al-Ma’mun, emir of the taifa of Toledo between 1043 and 1075. “He made great renovations to the palaces that included an important scientific program. He fostered a court full of intellectuals, the elite of the time, in addition to the acquisition of books and the study of what they called the science of the ‘ancients’, incorporating translations.”
It was the time of Azarquiel, an important Toledo astronomer and mathematician who emigrated to Seville after the Christian conquest of the city around the year 1085, but in addition and thanks to archaeological research, another type of technical literature in Spanish is preserved from that time. Arab, among whose authors stand out the Toledo agronomists Ibn Wafīd and Ibn Baṣṣāl, teacher and disciple, whose works would allow the creation of the Andalusian agronomic school. During the 11th century, Toledo was the epicenter of Agronomy knowledge.
Both scientists left interesting treatises where Botany, Pharmacy and Medicine were strongly linked. In the case of Ibn Baṣṣāl, his contribution with a widely disseminated practical treatise on agriculture is known. “In the 14th century it had reached Yemen. In general, it reached the entire Islamic world and also Europe,” highlights Sergio Isabel.
However, the importance of the agronomists of Tulaytula – the name of Toledo in the Islamic era – has gone unnoticed, explains the researcher, despite the projects in which they participated. “Al-Ma’mun, designed another twin palace complex with respect to the Historic Center, in what we know as ‘Huerta del Rey’. He wanted to create an almunia or aristocratic palace with orchards and botanical gardens in which they acclimatized plant species that came from the other end of the Mediterranean, implementing an entire botanical discipline that they adapted from the Greco-Latin and Indo-Persian world.
Few Toledoans know this part of history and those who starred in it. “His memory has been lost and few know that he was the basis of the entire scientific movement in Toledo and that of the School of Translators that Alfonso X The Wise encouraged.”
The project seeks to recover that memory and so will another of Toledo’s great museums in the spring. Carmen Álvarez Nogales, director of the Sephardic Museum, explains that the botanical itinerary in that case “will be fully integrated with the exhibition content of the museum. The selected species, between eight and ten, are very diverse and we want to point out with them what unites us,” he said, to elaborate on the fact of the important presence of the Sephardic culture (the Jewish one and the converts later) in Toledo among the 10th and 14th centuries.
“It is a very rewarding project and one of the milestones within the renovation of the museum that is taking place this year and part of next year. “We are in the final phase.”
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