Lady’s slipper

A Mythical Flower

Rare and funny, Lady’s slipper (or Cuckoo’s slipper) is good at playing hide and seek. From the eighteenth century it appeared in botanical publications to then vanish into a long silence denying its existence in the Pyrenees.

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Vegetable gardens

Vegetable Gardens in the Pyrenees

Family orchards and vegetable plots in the Catalan Pyrenees play a key role in conservation and management of biodiversity and preservation of traditional knowledge. They also help enhance social cohesion and welfare while, at the same time, affirming cultural identity.

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traditional knowledge about plants

«Abans que es pins facin magranes i ses figueres melons»*

The main goal of the study presented here is to compile traditional knowledge about plants in Formentera and Mallorca, with a focus on medicinal and food uses, before it is too late and such knowledge is lost.

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survival cuisine

Mediterranean Survival Cuisine

The habit of gathering leaves, flowers, roots, fruits of wild plants and mushrooms for cooking traditional dishes is dying out in parts of Alicante, although in other –mostly rural– areas these traditional recipes are still in use. Ethnobotanical studies conducted in the province of Valencia identify more than 110 wild species used as food.

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Protecting Biodiversity

The global debate on biodiversity has inevitably led us to consider traditional knowledge of plants, ethnobotany’s basic corpus, as an inseparable part of this discipline. This fact was amply recognised by the Convention on Biodiversity. Furthermore, ethnobotanical knowledge can and should be used to achieve sustainable development that is compatible with the conservation of biodiversity.

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Beloved Botany

Ethnobotany, the study of relationships between human societies and plants, is a discipline at the crossroads between natural sciences and social sciences. Such interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity breaches a purely scientific paradigm to bring researchers together from fields as diverse as anthropology...

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The Fishermen from El Palmar

One by one, the fishermen from El Palmar (Valencia) choose their fishing spots, also called redolins, as their names are called out by drawing lots. The first ones are the lucky ones—this year chance allows them to increase their benefits, since the chosen spots carry

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05-2012

Study, Imagination and Disposition against the Crisis

Study is not enough without imagination, and study and imagination together are not enough without natural disposition. J. W. Goethe The International Year of Forests was celebrated in 2011; however –unfortunately– the following of this event was somewhat erratic. The University of Valencia worked really actively on the event,

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