When in the mid-1950s, someone thought about building a dam in one of the driest areas of Portugal, the criticism was very simple: make a reservoir in Alquevassimply absurd: “it will never be filled.” And that prejudice meant that (for more than fifty years) the project was put in a drawer.
But, at the end of the century, the Portuguese country decided to take it back and its floodgates closed in 2002. What happened next showed that those critics had no idea.
A huge work of engineering. Of course, the skepticism was well founded. ‘Alqueva’ means precisely ‘fallow land’, ‘desert’. But that did not mean that it was meaningless, quite the opposite: that a much greater ambition was needed.
And that’s what they did: with a total capacity of 4,150 hm³ and a surface area of 250 km², it not only regulates the Guadiana. It provides water to supply the consumption network (200,000 inhabitants), to produce energy (520 MW) and to irrigate hundreds of thousands of hectares (130,000, it seems).
It is the largest reservoir in Western Europe.
A monster that now has to be unpacked. That is what is striking, that had to unpack. Not because it’s the first time: between 2010 and 2013 he did it on several occasionsbut the deep drought of recent years meant that there was no fear that it would not happen again.
Although it is happening: these days, Alquevas has been draining at the rate of an Olympic swimming pool every two seconds.
Is there much left to do? Although seeing the monstrous Alquevas reservoir full it is inevitable to think about what more projects are still to be done, the truth is that we do not have much room for maneuver. The majority of “easy” reservoirs are already built and most of those that could be built would have great technical, social and economic problems to carry out.
So we will have to go a little further: think about how we approach this possible “new normal” if it ever occurs.
Image | Ceinturion
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