It starts raining and someone says: “We’ll need all this water for later.” Spain’s relationship with dams, reservoirs and swamps seems complicated, as if catching every drop of torrential rain were a simple requirement. The reality is that in our country there are 374 reservoirs with 56,000 cubic hectometers (hm³) of capacity. This involves trapping approximately 50% of the country’s river flow.
Because Spain has always been a land of reservoirs. Before its official name existed, before the Enlightenment, before Velázquez was even born, there was already a 46-meter dam containing water in a town in Alicante. It still stands and, in fact, still works. And he continues watering gardens every summer.
Commissioned by a king, not a dictator. The Tibi Reservoir rises above the Monnegre Riverbetween the municipalities of Tibi and Jijona. Philip II commissioned its construction in 1580 to the Italian engineer Juan Bautista Antonelli, following a proposal from two residents of Muchamiel, Miguel Alcaraz and Pere Izquierdo, who knew well the behavior of the river.
After the first push, the works were stopped due to lack of money with only six meters of wall raised. They were resumed nine years later and finished in 1594. The result: a gravity dam with a curved plan, 46 meters high and 65 meters high, the highest in Europe at its time, a record that was not surpassed until the Enlightenment. Its arch design, with a radius of 107 meters, anticipated the technique of modern arch dams, those that transfer the force of water to their abutments and foundations.
Broken, repaired, and still in use. The reservoir suffered a major break in 1697 and several generations were left unable to use it. In 1601, a flood opened a crack and left the reservoir dry. They repaired it, but badly. And the years continued to pass. Until 1697, where a serious breakage left several generations unable to use its water. In fact, the dam remained unavailable for 40 years. In those days a legend was born that well deserves its folk horror film: the Quarantamaula, a bug that was half cat, half rooster, half wolf, which hid among the reeds. No one knew where the cracks originated and they spoke of sabotage.
Maybe it was the slope of the terrain, maybe it was an attack or something intentional using a drum of gunpowder. Or they simply used too cheap materials. In 1736 the repair began and lasted two years. And until today. The sediments accumulated over centuries reduced its original capacity, from between 4 and 5.4 million cubic meters, to the current 2 cubic hectometers. Even so, The Alicante Orchard Irrigation Union continues to manage it for the same purpose for which it was built: to water the Alicante orchard. In 1994, coinciding with the fourth centenary of its completion, the Generalitat Valenciana declared it an Asset of Cultural Interest.
Why is it still standing?. The secret is not only in the stone, it is in the surrounding rock. The technicians chose a gorge barely nine meters wide between two almost vertical limestone walls, Mos del Bou and La Cresta, and laid out the wall in a curve, with a radius of 107 meters, so that the thrust of the water was transmitted laterally towards that rock instead of falling only on the dam. In practice they built less of a wall and more of an artificial extension of the mountain: from floor to ceiling, this was carved ashlar on the outside, filled masonry on the inside.
That curved idea, so counterintuitive in 1580, did not come from any Crown engineer: it was proposed by Pere Esquerdo, a miller from Mutxamel whom local chronicles call “the first inventor of the swamp.” The royal technicians, the Antonellis, Jorge Palearo—and Juan de Herrera, the same architect of El Escorial, for the final revision of 1594— limited themselves to perfecting the idea of a neighbor without a title. The result lasted two centuries as the highest dam in the world. In 1941, already in the midst of Franco’s regime, a new drainage tunnel was added. That is all that the regime touched on Tibi, when it had already been operating for almost 350 years. The wall that is seen today is still, in essence, that of 1594.
There are even older dams. In fact, Tibi shares the podium with the Almansa reservoir, in Albacete, completed in 1584 and considered the first modern construction of this type in Europe. Between the two, Tibi is the one that has been operating the longest without interruption and the one that removed the most stone (more than 40,000 cubic meters).
And neither of them is the oldest in the country: The official inventory of large dams starts with Cornalvo and Proserpinanear Mérida, built by the Romans in the first century. And any historian knows that already built in wet. On the Arroyo de la Albuhera (a tributary of the Aljucén and, in turn, the Guadiana), Mérida, the Roman capital of Lusitania, had this earth and concrete dam covered with older granite ashlars. More than one hundred of the large dams that still exist in Spain today already existed in 1915, two decades before the Civil War.
The joke doesn’t fit the story.. The recurring joke that, when faced with any swamp, one says “Franco did it” is a pantomime. The regime itself fed that idea on purpose with the NO-DO, showing the dictator cutting ribbons and opening floodgates. And it is true that many reservoirs were built between 1939 and 1975: the WWF calculates 581 large dams alone between 1950 and 1980, with the labor of political prisoners in conditions of forced labor.
But Spanish hydraulic policy was not invented by Francoism. It was born in 1902 with the Gasset Plan, and was institutionalized in 1926, under Primo de Rivera, with the creation of the Hydrographic Confederations. His Avengers version, the most ambitious, the National Plan for Hydraulic Works of 1933, was a project of the Second Republic, with Indalecio Prieto at the helm. The Badajoz Plan itself, the flag of Francoism, has its embryo in those republican years. When Franco was born, Tibi and Almansa had been feeding their people for three centuries.
Today’s figures. Spain currently has between 1,200 and 1,300 large dams, the fifth country in the world after China, the United States, India and Japan, with a combined capacity of 56,043 cubic hectometers, according to the latest bulletin from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition. Right now we have more than 40,000 hm³ stored, at 75% of total capacityalmost ten points above the average of the last ten years.
The largest of all, the La Serena reservoir, in Badajoz, stores more water than any other in Spain and is only surpassed by two in all of Europe. Curious fact: just 96 reservoirs, of the more than a thousand that exist, accumulate 85% of all the impounded water in the country. The rest—Tibi included—are the majority in number, although a minimal fraction in volume. They are still essential for their regions, yes.
Images | Triplecane for Wikipedia/Unsplash (Yuliya Matuzava)
In Xataka | Spain still has dozens of reservoirs that cannot be used because literally no one has laid pipes
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