Uva del barco (Ohanes grape)

Before the greenhouses, Almería's great farming adventure was a grape — and Alhama lived at its centre. The Ohanes variety was born in the early 19th century high up the Andarax valley and spread down through Rágol, Terque and the whole vega; between 1880 and 1910, the expansion of the parrales and the grape trade transformed the village economy. Its waxy-yellow, elongated berry, thick-skinned and unusually firm, had a rare talent: it could endure weeks of travel without spoiling.

That talent made it a traveller. From 1835 it was shipped towards the northern markets and, in time, all the way to the Americas, in wooden barrels of about 22 kilos where the clusters were carefully bedded on fine sawdust — cork in the early days, pine later on. In 1907 nearly two and a half million barrels left the port for England, Germany, the United States, Scandinavia and South America, and a provincial study still records 113,005 barrels produced in Alhama alone in 1928: figures from another age, historical witnesses rather than current data. People named it after what they saw: uva del barco — the ship grape —, uva de embarque, uva de Almería.

The 20th century put out the trade — the American market closed in the late 1920s, earlier-ripening grapes from other countries won the game and, between 1987 and 1996, subsidised grubbing-up reduced the vineyards to a fraction. The memory remains, and it is active: in Terque, a few kilometres away, the Museo Provincial de la Uva del Barco keeps this history; in Alhama, one of the last Ohanes parrales takes part in safeguarding the variety, and in 2024 cuttings of historic table-grape varieties, which IFAPA helps identify and conserve, were handed out in the village. It is living memory and varietal safeguarding — not the return of that industry.