Boats from Algeria frequently arrive on the coast of Alicante, this Thursday several shipwrecked people were rescued after one of them capsized. It is a close relationship, prolonged, secular, sometimes violent, often friendly, always commercial. The Algerian community is abundant in Alicante. In the 2001 census, the natives of that country constituted the largest foreign community in the city: 8,092 registered, 4,915 men and 3,177 women. Far behind are Colombians (5,105) and Moroccans (3,760).
It is therefore an integrated, diverse community that has made trade between the two countries an important source of business, taking advantage of the existence of a permanent maritime connection with Oran. Every time the Algerie-Ferries ship docks in Alicante, the large clothing stores at low prices and the nearby industrial estates see their turnover multiplied thanks to a clientele that buys entire carts of garments to trade with them.
Algerians have also been, for years, the foreign group that acquires the most real estate in the city, either for their own home or as an investment; Some of the recently opened tourist apartment buildings in the center belong to businessmen from the North African country.
But that population transit that today flows towards the Spanish city, there was a time when it did it in the opposite direction. Of course, it did so as a result of the defeat in the Civil War that dramatically forced hundreds of Republicans to escape into dramatic exile in labor camps where many lost their lives, but it also happened many years before, in the 19th century. , when thousands of people from Alicante sought in Algeria a provisional or definitive solution to the precariousness of times of hardship.
In an essay entitled Alicantinos en Argelia, a round trip, published in the Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos, Alba Valdés reviews the works of authors who before her have dealt with a subject that is difficult to document, and summarizes it in a didactic and effective.
He states from the outset that Alicante, at the beginning of the 19th century, had an eminently agrarian population, with a tendency to smallholdings and land dispersion, which was an obstacle to development. "The main crops at the time were cereal, almond, olive, carob and vine, all seasonal, which led to situations of seasonal unemployment (...). At that time there was no relevant industrial alternative, perhaps Alcoy , as an industrial nucleus, was beginning to rebound".
Therefore, the reasons for almost all the migrations of the people from Alicante to Algeria were economic, "some because they had nothing, others because they had lost everything and, least of all, because they wanted to make a fortune".
A reference work, Los alicantinos en la Argelia francesa (1830-1914), by Juan Bautista Vilar Ramírez, relates that "in 1846 the drought in the Alicante area was so harsh and living conditions became so difficult that even The Captain General of Valencia wrote in 1849: "the situation is so hard that... they have taken the sad alternative of starving to death with their families or emigrating to the neighboring coasts of Africa".
Another author, José Fermín Bonmatí, explains that "the standard of living was one of the lowest in the country, and the slightly more thriving areas of the province such as Alcoy, with an incipient industry, or work in the port of Alicante did not they could absorb all the workers. Thus, we can date emigration from Alicante to Algeria at the beginning of French colonization. From 1845, emigration from Alicante to Algeria reached its full development. The first emigrants belonged to the Alicante orchard, which It later spread to dryland areas such as Muchamiel, San Juan, Benimagrell, Santa Faz, Villafranqueza..."
This same author figures in about 20,000 emigrants from the entire province of Alicante who migrate in these years. In the 1940s, Spaniards represented almost half of the European citizens in Oran, and in rural areas the percentage is higher.
After the drought of the 1940s, the slight bonanza of the Spanish economy in the 1950s caused some people from Alicante to return, having failed their migratory adventure due to the harsh living conditions that existed in Algeria in those first years of colonization. "The arrival from Algeria to the port of Torrevieja, between the years 1855 and 1857, of at least 533 people from Alicante confirms this," says Alba Valdés.
There were episodes of violence, such as the attack on hundreds of laborers who were collecting esparto grass in 1881, with more than 100 victims among the Spaniards, an event that led to a fleeting exodus to the peninsula, but throughout that decade the arrival of Alicante and Almeria was constant, among them, numerous women, wives in many cases of men who had settled in the region.
A document from the General Directorate of the Statistical Geographic Institute certifies that of the 30,057 Alicante who emigrated between 1891 and 1895, the vast majority -29,159- had Algeria as their destination, while only 257 went to Europe, 223 to colonies still held by Spain and 392 they went to America.
The first maritime lines of regular transport between the two countries were born from that time, first as a stopover for the connections that Algiers and Oran had with Marseille; but in 1869 the maritime line between Orán and Cartagena was officially inaugurated by the French company “Compañía General de transportes fluviales y marítimos”.
Starting in the 1970s, Spanish shipping companies became interested in communication with Algeria and the first routes between Alicante-Oran-Algiers appeared. It was also frequent in these years, explains Alba Valdés, "to see fragile ships coming from the Alicante coast, arriving at the coasts of Algeria carrying a handful of laborers looking for work on board". Fragile ships, fragile lives, fragile memory.
