The humanist Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), who was Venetian ambassador to the courts of Charles I during a stay in Spain, wrote a letter from Seville to his friend Ramusio in 1526, in which he refers to some sweet orange trees that he had sent him some time before, destined for the Murano Garden, which Ramusio owned in Venice. Navagero himself also comments that the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas, on the outskirts of Seville, abounds with groves of orange, lemon, citron and myrtle trees.
In this respect, the French botanist Charles de l’Ecluse or Clusius (1527-1607), who lived in Seville between 1563 and 1564 and was related to the Valencian Juan Plaza, professor of Herbes, and to other naturalists such as the Sevillian Simón de Tovar, refers to the same monastery saying that there are orange trees with sweet-juice fruits which in Spain are called Cajel (Caxel) oranges, and which are different from those with sour juice. Thus, this was the name, whose origin we do not know, used to identify this variety of sweet orange. In our opinion, it must have belonged to the same type that Navagero met in Seville around 1525 and sent to his friend Ramusio, although without assigning them any specific name, only sweet oranges.
This name, Cajel, must have endured over time, although it has not been found in any foreign work. The Jesuit and naturalist Bernabé Cobo (1580-1657) in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1956) mentions it in Mexico or Peru, saying that there are oranges with a thick rind, called cageles.
It is therefore logical to think that some kind of sweet orange tree existed in Spain between the 15th and 16th centuries, some decades before the dates on which Navagero mentions its presence for the first time (1526), since Navagero himself, throughout his work, always speaks of enormous trees.
All this suggests that at the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the 16th century a sweet-tasting orange, or at least not very sour, was known in Spain, Italy and France, and that in Spain it was called Cajel and later also Zajari.
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La entrada EPISODE #9 CAJEL ORANGE, THE PRIMITIVE SWEET ORANGE aparece primero en Seville Oranges.