For yet another year, Casa Árabe is taking part in the Cordoba Festival of Patios as a non-competitor. The festival will be held in the city from May 2-14. For the occasion, we will be holding a conference titled “The flora of Al-Andalus and its farm and forest landscapes: A milestone in the agricultural diversity globalization process?,” given by J. Esteban Hernández Bermejo, an agricultural engineer and head of that department at the University of Cordoba, as well as the director of the Andalusian Germplasm Bank.

Hernández Bermejo will be introducing both the past history and current developments in Al-Andalus’ flora and the farm and forest landscapes in the region.

The translation and identification of works written by botanists and geoponists from Al-Andalus makes is possible to discover what farming and forest species and landscapes existed there. Texts by legal experts, travelers and poets complete this documentation and ability to determine this. This real-life “Ministry of Time” allows us to perceive an agrosilvopastoral environment whose three key words would be diversity, tradition and innovation. Three dimensions, or rather, a reformulation of the stereotype of Spain’s three cultures.

Diversity, translated into a wealth of species, varieties and associated knowledge, along with the mosaic of agricultural and periurban reticulated landscapes (fruit and vegetable farms, farming manors, orchards, gardens and tree-filled spaces). Tradition, due to syncretism in the inclusion of Spanish-Roman and Eastern farming techniques for cultivation, dissemination, irrigation and their cultures regarding plants used in medicines, food, decoration and handicrafts. Innovation, because it includes new species and knowledge originating from Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Asian Orient, along with the experimental domestication of Iberian fauna itself. Al-Andalus not only consisted of a time and space, but also a phenomenon amongst historical events, one of the most transcendental milestones in the history of cultivated plants and the process of globalization in agricultural diversity. It is a milestone that came about in the Cordoba of the caliphs, which matured and was sequenced under the taifa kingdoms of a gradually shrinking territory which, far from vanishing with the Nasrid dynasty, stretched out later on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, with effects reaching our modern times. We will try to demonstrate this.

J. Esteban Hernández Bermejo has a PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, where he was a professor from 1972 to 1979. A numerary professor and department head at the University of Cordoba from 1981 to date, he was the promoter and director of Cordoba’s Botanical Garden since it was created in 1980 and until 2008, and the scientific director of Castile-La Mancha’s Botanical Garden from 2008 through 2011. He is currently the director of the Andalusian Germplasm Bank  (since 2001).

He has been a member of the Scientific Commission of the Medina Zahara Archeological Site (Cordoba, 1996-2002) and an advisor to the Alhambra Board of Trustees on the project to restore the Generalife Gardens (from 2007 to date). Internationally, he has been an advisor to the FAO and UNEP on different projects and in several Latin American countries.

He has directed 17 doctoral theses, and his publications include 21 books, over 110 chapters of books, 85 articles in scientific journals and more than 150 publications for teaching and the general public. Most notable amongst his works are those related with botany and agronomy in Al-Andalus, as well as ethnobotany and historical landscape gardening (in the period of Al-Andalus, as well), phytogenic resources and conservation biology. He has taken part in numerous presentations and events at 160 congresses and scientific gatherings, and has also been an organizer or curator of at least twenty such events.