A town in the alpine meadow

With what grows here (barley and dredge, rye and maslin, oats), this land can feed a town of about 1,000 people from farms less than a day's cart from its walls.

Build a town in the alpine meadow

A town of 10,000 here

Its grain comes from 78 km around, 3.5 days by cart (not by land alone). About 1,000 villages and 79,000 country people farm it, and the town keeps about 40 scholars. A city of 10,000 cannot live off this land alone.

In history

From about the 12th century, Walser settlers from the upper Valais moved into the higher Alpine valleys. Many held a "Walser right": personal freedom, their own courts and land their children would inherit, in return for a modest due and service in war. In 1292 they founded Juf, at 2,126 m in the Grisons, above the tree line. The nearest forest was about 5 km away, so timber for houses and stables was carried up, and families burned dried dung for heat. In the dry inner Valais, villages led mountain water to their meadows through channels called bisses or Suonen, recorded from the 12th century. Where a channel met a cliff, it ran in a wooden trough hung on beams wedged into holes cut in the rock.

On the Andean altiplano, above 3,800 m, Quechua and Aymara farmers made a store out of frost. After the autumn harvest, small bitter potatoes were left out for about three nights to freeze, trodden underfoot to squeeze out the water and the skins, then dried in the sun: chuño. It is older than the Inca, for it has been found at Tiwanaku. José de Acosta described it in 1590, and Inca soldiers ate it on the march. The geographer Carl Troll even argued that these freezing nights helped the Inca Empire rise.

How large a city?

PeopleGrain fromBy cartVillagesScholars
3,00043 km around2 days (strained)31012
10,00078 km around3.5 days (not by land alone)1,00040
40,000160 km around6.5 days (not by land alone)4,200160
150,000300 km around12.5 days (not by land alone)16,000600
1,000,000780 km around31.5 days (not by land alone)100,0004,000

Living there

Its woods spare enough to burn: about 18,000 tonnes of wood a year for its hearths and workshops. Provisional figure.

Its market sells grain, flax, herbs, potato and wool, and buys timber, iron and salt. About 250 market towns stand in its countryside.

About 50% of what its people eat does not come from the fields. Of that share: herds 90%, gardens 10%. That is some 10,000 livestock units on 150 km² of pasture. Hearth estimate.

What makes it hard

  • Water must be led to the fields. On a dry slope the crops and the village itself hang on their channels, some of them hung across cliffs, and building or mending them is dangerous work.
  • No wood grows this high. Timber for a house is carried up from forests below, and the hearth burns dried dung.
  • Summer is short and never safe: snow can fall even in summer.
  • In the Andes, nights freeze hard in June and July, and the potatoes kept for the store are a bitter, frost-resistant kind. A village that turns them into chuño holds a store that keeps for years, sometimes decades.
  • Mountain settlers often held their freedom and their land in return for service in war: when the lord calls, the herders march.

Hard years

About one year in 8, the harvest falls below four fifths of a normal one: the town is short of some 460 of the 1,600 tonnes of grain its land gives it, with no water to bring the gap in. A plague that kills 39% of the town, as the Black Death did in Europe's towns, would leave about 7,400 km² of its fields idle.

What it can make

Grain (at a cost), Flax, Orchards (at a cost), Herbs, Potato, Wool, Horses (at a cost), Cattle and hides, Cheese, Pigs and bacon (at a cost), Goats, Honey and wax (at a cost), Furs

What its land cannot give, a town here must buy: timber.

What it lives on

Barley and dredge, Rye and maslin, Oats

Underground

What a city digs depends on the rock under it: Granite, Volcanic rock, Ultramafic rock (peridotite, serpentinite), Schist and gneiss, Marble, Limestone and chalk, Sandstone, shale and clay, Salt beds, River gravels and sands

Found here

Gathered (Rerum): Bistort Bulbils, Bistort Root, Alpine Marmot Fat, Alpine Marmot Tooth, Black Bear Fat, Black Bear Hide, Black Bear Meat, Beeswax Block

Hear it

Alpine Meadow in Biomes: plants, animals, hazards and sounds

The same climate

A town in the alpine meadow, on a river, A town in the alpine meadow, on the coast

By city size

1,000, 3,000, 10,000, 30,000, 100,000, 300,000, 1,000,000

Sources

Open the city builder — MGS Toolbox