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The Mediterranean Basin
A rare climate, an inland sea, and five thousand years of use
A climate this agreeable is rare. Only five places on Earth have it — hot dry summers, mild wet winters — and the Mediterranean Basin is by far the largest of them: the lands wrapped around a nearly landlocked sea, where olive, vine, cork oak and pine grow and where, not coincidentally, cities have clustered for five thousand years. The distinction matters. The Mediterranean Sea is the water; the basin is the sea plus the belt of land that shares its climate and its vegetation, from Portugal to the Levant and along the whole North African shore. It is a biodiversity hotspot and, at the same time, one of the most thoroughly humanized landscapes anywhere.
The sea is a remnant of the ancient Tethys, joined to the Atlantic only by the 14-kilometer Strait of Gibraltar and, since 1869, to the Red Sea by the Suez Canal. Mountains crowd its coasts: the Atlas in the Maghreb, the Sierra Nevada in Spain, where Mulhacen tops the basin at 3,479 meters, the Apennines, the Dinarides, the Taurus. Volcanoes — Etna, Vesuvius, Stromboli — mark the slow collision of Africa with Europe, which also keeps the region seismically restless. Summer drought forces plants into hard leaves and deep roots, producing the scrub known as maquis or garrigue. Fire is native here, though hotter, longer summers are making it far harder to manage.
Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans and Venetians all treated the sea as a road rather than a barrier, and the religions, alphabets, crops and cuisines of the basin traveled along its shipping lanes. Today some 500 million people live in the countries around it and roughly 300 million tourists arrive each year, straining water supplies that were never generous. The region is warming about 20 percent faster than the global average: droughts are deepening, the sea is rising against low-lying deltas such as the Nile's, and fish stocks are heavily overexploited. The Mediterranean diet, meanwhile, has become a global export — one more instance of this basin sending its habits out into the world.