The year of Dalia, the pinnata Dahlia, was chosen this year by the organizers of the festival. Well said, it's the year of Dahlia. Dictionaries and encyclopedias in Euskera call this plant “dalia”; I think we should call it “dahlia”.

The Spanish invaders who met Dahlia on the plateau of Mexico, not far from there would have been some Basque. Charles III of Spain organized a trip to find out what raw materials could be captured and carried out in the territories under the empire. Among many other plants and animals, in that Mexico that today called New Spain, the Aztecs met the dahlia they called “chichipatli”, “acocotli” and “coanenepilli”. They cultivated their underground tuber as a vegetable for eating, like a potato, the Solanum tuberosum. After bringing him to Europe, he was also classified as a vegetable.

In 1789 the first tubers arrived in Europe, the Botanical Garden of Madrid, and flourished the following year. Valencian priest Antonio José Cavanilles, who was his director, described them perfectly and gave them the name of Dahlia in honor of Swedish botanist Anders Dahl. He was known especially for having published the Botanical Observationes. The priest was an amateur who had dedicated all the genus and given him three species: Dahlia pinnata, Dahlia coccinea and Dahlia rosea.

The first dahlis were sent from Madrid to Paris in 1802, where the botanist André Thouin planted them at the Museum of Natural History. In 1805, Alexandre Humboldt sent dahlia seeds from Mexico to Berlin by the botanist Carl Ludvig Willdenow. Not knowing if he had already been appointed and classified, the German gave another name to the dahlia: Georgina was named a genus in honor of the German botanist Johann Gottlieb Georgi. The matter was clarified later, and as Dahlia was older, it remained firm and Georgina withdrew. It is still called “georgina” in Russia, Ukraine and Mexico.

Our Anders Dahl was a student of renowned Swedish scientist Carl von Linné. Linné created the scientific name or two-word binomial nomenclature to call all species (such as those living, lost). She said in 1755: “Payroll if nescis, perit et cognitio rerum” meaning: if you don’t know the name of things, what you know about them also disappears.