What Pego Kept

Bombó rice (Bombón in Castilian) had not been grown in the Pego marshes for more than fifty years. When Vicent Dominguis and his son went asking the oldest farmers what had happened to it, most of them said it was gone. They kept asking, and the variety turned out to have survived in the hands of someone who had not thought it mattered. Today father and son grow it again at Pego Natura, and it is on Quique Dacosta's menu. The rice is only half of what they are restoring: the wetlands around it are returning as a habitat for birds, which is what happens when a marsh is farmed as a marsh again.