The International Day held in Riba-roja de Túria on Valencian historic gardens favors the incorporation of new and good practices in the Living pharmacies project (European Commission 2024)

Aromas Itinerarium Salutis closed the month of September with an International Conference on Valencian medicinal gardens and their frame of reference: Europe. The day was inaugurated by Robert Raga Gadea, mayor of Riba-roja de Túria and member of the Board of Directors of Aromas Itinerarium Salutis.

Medicinal gardens, both monastic and lay, were of great importance since the Middle Ages. Not only did they produce a great variety of plants that were the basis of materia medica throughout centuries in our territories of origin, but they were also the root of productive activities that were linked to food (confections), the arts (materials dyes used in painting and dry cleaning) or ritual (aromas for worship), among other possibilities. Due to this, over many centuries these medicinal gardens became spaces that favored a local economy with deep roots in the communities, which in recent decades has almost become extinct as a result of the progressive disappearance of these green hectares. And so, for example, Ricardo Folgado, member of the Very Illustrious College of Pharmacists of Valencia, recalled in his presentation that Sagunto street in Valencia was formerly delimited by several of these medicinal gardens, which - in turn, linked to hospitals -, today have also disappeared.

Along these same lines, Catarina Miguel (Universidade Évora, Portugal), Scientific Committee of Aromas Itinerarium Salutis, presented an identical situation in the case of medicinal gardens that were active centuries ago in three monasteries of Évora, and this was also illustrated by Miguel Álvarez Soaje, member of the Technical Committee of Aromas Itinerarium Salutis, in the case of the medicinal garden that once formed part of the Monastery of Sobrado in Galicia.

PartnerSHIP & COLLABORATORS