Racial Purity: The Enlightened Dream to Colonize Spain

"[General Joaquín Acosta] continued his march [in southern Spain], passing through the German Colony, which was populated in a stretch of land between Córdoba and Écija by King Carlos III, and whose capital is said to be the most beautiful population named Carlota, where the influence of the northern races may be noted." -D. Januario Triana, 1853

With my growing fascination for the Enlightenment in Spain I've come across a bizarre fun fact. In the mid eighteenth century King Carlos III and a select crew of his enlightened advisors took up the project of colonizing Andalucía (yes, the most southern and hottest desert region of the peninsula) with German Catholics. In this stretch of land described by Januario Triana (in his biography of General Joaquín Acosta's travels through southern Spain), a cluster of towns was built from scratch, each with symmetrical quadrants, right-angled streets, an experiment of enlightened ideals in practice, each town named in honor of the royal family.

"La Carlota was founded in 1767 by the interest of King Carlos III to colonize the unpopulated regions of the Guadalquivir River valley and the Sierra Morena. The legal administration to carry out this colonizing project was constituted by the Fuero of New Populations of Andalucía, which established three vast zones for colonization whose seats of government would reside in La Carolina (Jaén), La Carlota (Córdoba) and La Luisiana (Sevilla). The objective of this colonization was twofold: on the one hand, to protect the transportation of goods in these areas (unpopulated after the ethnic cleansing that followed the Castillian invasion of Al-Andalus [several centuries prior]) that served as refuge for bandits and theives, and on the other hand, to put into production and cultivation the vast regions of southern Spain that had until then remained fallow. The project was implemented by two great enlightened thinkers: Campomanes y Pablo de Olavide, who was commissioned to undertake the project of colonization. Juan Gaspar de Thurriegel [a Bavarian immigrant] was designated overseer of the grouping of colonies that inhabited these lands, for which he brought close to six thousand German and Dutch colonizers to Spain, as well as some Catalans and Valencians."

Building a town in a desert means having your very own tabula rasa, an empty space with no history and no hang-ups (except for that ethnic cleansing bit from many centuries ago), a terrain of no memory upon which one may design and construct an enlightened utopia. The French model of rational urban planning employed in the construction of La Carlota may be seen today, with its "streets that cross at perpendicular angles and give way to symmetrical town blocks that extend to both sides of the main throughway." That is, the urban model provided an efficiency for commerce and an ample habitus for upstanding (German) Catholics. In sum, the settlers' presence would police the unruly bandits, increase production and, perhaps implied by this set of moral corrections, rub off an ethical citizenry on the locals. All in all, the Spanish Enlightenment's wet dream.

It was hoped that with these pocket settlments, Spain might serve as a European model for enlightened reform, an importation of northern efficiency in Andalucía. "The towns and cities founded on this new foundation are called New Populations, whose principal objective is to suppress the great territorial inequalities, better take advantage of the land's resources, repopulate desert zones and create a newly reformed, idealist and utopian society that would serve as the model for the rest of Spain and Europe. Thus, King Carlos III, Campomanes and Pablo de Olavide, together with others, made it possible that men from diverse European nations could come and transform fallow lands into living towns." It would seem that the Spanish Enlightened thinkers who took up this project perceived the "German work ethic" and "Catholic morality" as a valuable model for modernization in Spain, an assumption we might recognize today on a sliding scale with dangers such as "ethnic superiority" and its catastrophic consequences for the twentieth century.

Not surprisingly, however, the transplant of German settlers to the Spanish desert failed miserably. The settlers arrived before construction of the towns was completed and, as if the lack of shelter and searing heat weren't enough, they became vulnerable to continued attacks by bandits who set fires to surrounding lands in attempts to regain control of the roads travelling through these regions. Ironically, the Germanic traits that the Enlightened advisors hoped would become instilled in the local culture were foiled in part by the plan's shoddy implementation and, as well, by the hijacking and black market trade of stolen goods.

During his visit to the settlements in 1769, Olavide paints an abject portrait of the unfortunate participants of his enlightened experiment. "I have not, without feeling great pain, been able to see the deplorable state in which I found her [the colony of La Carlota]... Many people live in wooden shacks, without more than a wooden slab for a roof, the residents scolded by the strong heat of Andalucía, evident in that these people suffer greatly in health. For all of this I desired to push forward the schedule of erecting houses this past summer, and it becomes clear that those who do have shelter suffer less, or almost nothing at all. And yet it was impossible to make them [the shelters] all at once since there are not enough hands nor materials, but at least each family lives on its own plot of land making a shed on it, and with the help of his neighbor obligated to this work, but for those who best have conserved their health, each family lives separated with the greatest possible ventilation possible, even in shanties covered with palms and other sticks to better cover the sun. Here they might live with a better toilet facilities, not in the impractical sheds of wooden slats that abound in hundreds, of people turned about, the bigger aside the smaller, the healthy with the sick, exposed to filth, disorder and contagion."

Call it the enlightened dream at its most abject achievement, the concentration camp.