Since February, there is a dam 14 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea that releases water uninterruptedly. Until “30,000 liters per second“they leave the Rules Reservoirthey cross the lower plain of Guadalfeo and enter the sea.
A few kilometers away, on the right bank of the river, there are thousands of hectares of tropical fruit trees. struggling with brackish water pumped from permanently overexploited wells.
This is a textbook example of the “Spanish way of managing water.”
But let’s be precise. Actually, the question “why are we letting that water go into the sea?” has several answers. The simplest and most obvious is that there is no more water in that swamp. Granada is coming off the best snow season in more than a decade. The high elevations of the Sierra Nevada had almost four meters of ‘white gold’ in February and that gold has begun to melt quickly.
It is true that the massif has a complex network of irrigation ditches to try to ‘contain’ all that water and delay its arrival to the sea, but it is a matter of time before that water would have to leave Rules. A single piece of information explains it simply: since February the reservoir has received more than twice as much water as its operational capacity.
In fact, the water is being ‘thrown’ into the sea because it is overflowing from its spillway. Is the second time in its history that this has happened.
The other answer… is that, 22 years later and a cost overrun of more than 200 million eurosthe stored water still does not irrigate the fences 9,000 hectares of subtropical areas of the Tropical Coast. The pipelines are still under construction and, although some may be finished in the coming months, others have not even started.
Government, Board, Provincial Council and City Councils have been throwing things at each other for years without solving the problem. And it is not clear that it will be resolved: now the Granada Provincial Council has reactivated the debatebut we must remember that elections are on the horizon. It is time to make promises of investments that no one knows if they will come to fruition.
Meanwhile, the Kafkaesque system of subtropical agriculture continues to push the region to the limit.
Because that is the worst news of all. Even in the best year in living memory, water is not enough. When we don’t have it, because we don’t have it. When we have it, because we have not built the pipeline that would allow us to use it for decades. Rules, as we said months agoit is a curiosity, but what a curiosity.
Because we all know that Spain has a problem with water and we have to recognize that we have been very imaginative trying to solve it. But what we must not forget is that one of the great pending issues is to assume that managing this problem involves making decisions and carrying them out.
Image | Cristina Borge
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