The other day I spoke with known that I told me that, when I was little, in the Ayamonte of the 60s and 70s, they went to school with water boots. Not only that, he told me, “I remember the white houses putting green because it kept raining.” At that time, I was not sure if it was true or it was nostalgia altering the memories of childhood, but seeing what is happening at the southern end of the peninsula, I would not surprise me anything.
And it is that March 2025, just It has just converted in the most rainy month in several places in the country. Among them, the Aaemet Huelva Observatory – Ronda whose maximum historical data, since 1985, had been 164.6 mm. Yesterday, at 20:30, I had already collected 169.2mm. And there are 20 days left.
Huelva, however, is simply a metaphor of Spain.
An poisoned gift. Although the type of rain that is reaching us from the Atlantic is fantastic and does not have the torrentiality levels of the Danas, there are a point also begin to give problems. First because we have no infrastructure that can collect, accumulate and distribute all that liquid.
As we commented a few days agothe red basin, the Odiel and the stones was above 94% of its capacity. That placed it at the level of the interior basins of the Basque Country and above Galicia or the Eastern Cantabrian.
It is true that these data have trap (not only have little storage capacity, but in the area many coexit dead reservoirs Cargaditos of mining waste), but is indicative of what is happening in the rest of the country.
Floods throughout the country. The clearest case has happened in the Toledo municipality of Escalona and its region. There, the Alberche River (just the one who, As we said yesterdayhe was going to receive an unprecedented amount of water) has overflowed and has caught many people with the step changed. However, more than 15 tajo stations They were yesterday Above the red warning threshold.
And, if we expand the frame, we will see Floods in Sevillein The Golden Costain Vitoria or in Cartagena. Catalonia, for the first time in years, seems to drought endemic that lives.
Are they good news? Yes, but with nuances. Obviously, water will come very well to face the next summer months. It gives us an irreplaceable margin to decide whether we want to learn from our previous mistakes.
As explained in Datadista“From the deep drought of the 1990s, each dry period has served to implement emergency measures (…) or allow practices that were not eliminated when the rains returned, they were used to expand irrigation, increasing the problem of overexploitation and contamination of aquifers and wetlands to which they feed.”
What are the nuances? The first is that ‘too much blow water’ also creates problems. Citrus flowers or Strawberry crops can begin to rot (or infect with fungi) in full campaign. That is, climate changes catch crops in different phases of the usual ones and that has impacts on the productive system.
But the second nuance is perhaps more important: that the incentives not to take advantage of this blow of luck and not Implement the changes that The Spanish Water System needs.
And, in the meantime, it does not stop raining. Nor does it seem to stop doing it.
Image | Karel Roose | ECMWF
In Xataka | Aemet special notices are just the beginning: everything points to an extremely rainy March in Spain
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