The rice that slept for fifty years

When Paula Dominguis asked the oldest farmers of Pego what happened to the Bombón variety, most of them laughed. Gone, they said. Then one of them remembered a drawer.

Inside it, a handful of seeds nobody had planted in over fifty years. What followed was three seasons of trial, failure, and a single surviving row that became the start of a revival.

Today, Bombón rice grows again in the Pego marshes, and Dacosta puts it on the menu. The wetlands it depends on are also a biotope for birds, so restoring the grain has meant restoring a whole ecosystem alongside it.