Under the slogan “produce!!, produce!! and produce!!,” starting even during the Spanish Civil War and continuing during the subsequent long dictatorship, Franco’s regime implemented in the country a large-scale industrialization project. During the first twenty years of the regime, characterized by the adoption of a political, sociocultural and economic model of autarkic basis, a significant portion of the national territory was transformed into a sort of industrial testing ground.

In this context, the agrarian issue and, more specifically, control over the country’s water resources, became issues of vital importance. By targeting areas where untapped natural potential coincided with acute social instability, the Franco regime sought to achieve a profound restructuring of the economic and sociocultural structures of large areas of the country.

This was the case with the development plan implemented in the province of Badajoz. In a sequence that descends through the different scales involved in the process, this paper examines various dimensions of the colonization process, particularly in relation to the role of water in Franco’s agrarian policy and its impact on production intensification and rural social transformation. By considering physical, sociocultural and aesthetic transformations, it shows that this spatial design practice led to the emergence of a new landscape. One that is often naively perceived today as pristine, but which is, in fact, the outcome of a state-planned project of large-scale territorial and social construction that was undertaken only seventy years ago.