A Short History Of The Potato

There has long been debate as to who actually was responsible for introducing the potato to England. But regardless of the competing claims of Sir Francis Drake or Thomas Harriot, the potato was to prove to be a grand agricultural success. But before it turned up in England, it had appeared in Spain, which is only logical given that the Spaniards had been all over southern America like a rash from the moment that Columbus didn't discover America but rather the Caribbean. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the potato was being cultivated in Spain, such as in the Basque Country, but its migration to other parts of the country was slow. And right at the back of the potato revolution queue was Mallorca.

They held the annual potato fair in Sa Pobla at the weekend. The spud is to Sa Pobla as the orange is to Sóller, yet remarkably enough it was Sóller where it was once cultivated in some abundance, possibly equally as much as in Sa Pobla. But  this cultivation wasn't to occur, with anything like intensity, until roughly 300 years after the Spaniards of empire had first introduced the potato to Spain.

It was the Menorcans who were responsible, and they in turn had the British to thank. Wherever the Briton roamed in occupation, he took the potato with him, and so Menorca became the nursery for what was, many years later, to become a primary source of Sa Pobla's agricultural economy.

It was, it would seem, one Alexandre de Cauterac who was the chief initial advocate of the potato. In 1799, he recognised that the potato could become an important crop as part of the recovery of parts of the Albufera wetlands next to Sa Pobla. While the reclaiming of the wetlands through the drainage by the British engineers in the second half of the nineteenth century is rightly recognised as having created greater agricultural possibilities, there had already been some small-scale reclaiming. The land was deemed suitable for vegetable growing. Up until then, Sa Pobla's economy had been based on vines, cereals, hemp and flax. Despite the water of the wetlands, the town's agriculture, and indeed the town itself, was relatively poor. In the sixteenth century, for example, it had been observed that "the village which is poorest in water ... is that of Sa Pobla, where the number of wells does not even reach ten".

But even once the potato was revealed to the island, the cultivation was slow to take off. Mallorca's Captain General offered a prize in 1816 for the best potatoes to be grown in Alcudia and Sa Pobla. Twenty years later the Mallorcan Economic Society of Friends of the Land were issuing reports commending cultivation, but though the potato was being grown, the volume was such that it was almost a luxury. The Sóller growers of the mid-1860s were able to command high prices for this new and delicious food. Nevertheless, the potato's popularity among Sa Pobla's farming community was on the rise. Though he didn't specifically identify the potato, the Archduke Louis Salvador, whose "Die Balearen" was as much a census of economic production on Majorca as a work of cultural observation, was able to say in 1872 that 477 hectares of production on marshy farmland included vegetables, by which he mainly meant the potato.

Initially, the potatoes were grown as animal feed. There was a reluctance to eat something that was grown in soil, as there was an assumption that it might not be good for the health. But elsewhere, such as in France, the potato was gaining a reputation as the "bread of the poor", so by around the mid-nineteenth century cultivation started to take off, albeit it was to remain mostly for personal consumption rather than to be on a grand scale. The Archduke could see that there was development, but it wasn't until the British engineers got to work that there was the land for more intensive production.

Different varieties of potato were introduced but it was to be the Royal Kidney variety which was to truly turn Sa Pobla into the potato economy it became, and this didn't appear until 1924. By then, the town's potatoes were being exported to the UK, but with the Royal Kidney, production grew massively and so did the export trade. Sa Pobla was to become a part of British eating habits: the town was exporting a variety of new potato. As the town had also benefited from the introduction of rice in Albufera around the turn of the twentieth century, this once poor agricultural town ceased to be poor.

So, the potato fair - a celebration of the gastronomy, very much removed from the days when there was a reluctance to eat potatoes - symbolises Sa Pobla's potato agricultural tradition: a tradition which is more recent than one might have thought.