About 3,000 years ago, when the Phoenicians from the eastern Mediterranean landed on the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, they were surprised by the huge number of wild rabbits living there. According to one theory, they called the land Hispania, which in Phoenician means “land of rabbits.” When Spain became part of the Roman Empire around 200 BC, some coins depicted rabbits as a symbol of the country. Pliny and Varro wrote that in Tarragona, a Spanish city, a large number of rabbits dug their burrows under the houses, causing twenty-five or thirty homes to collapse. Basiluzzo, one of the Lipari Islands, lost all its crops and was left starving due to a sudden rabbit population boom.
In the mid-1500s, Dumas wrote that rabbits were so numerous in the southern provinces of France that a gentleman from Provence brought back six hundred after a single hunt. Unlike most livestock, which have been bred for thousands of years for food, rabbits were selectively bred only from the 5th century. This animal has always been considered a symbol of fertility, as ten females can give birth to up to nine hundred offspring in a year.