In 1850, Almería inaugurated one of the largest hydraulic works in 19th century Spain. It was a complete disaster
It is May 8, 1850, Níjar (Almería). Although the promoters have been trying for months, finally the inauguration of the Isabel II reservoir will not have the physical presence of the Queen which gives it its name. But they are not going to let that ruin the moment, their moment. We talk about what may be the largest hydraulic work of the Andalusian 19th century and one of the most ambitious on the peninsula: 35 meters of stonework built at will by more than a thousand private investors that culminate the old dream of the Duchess of Abrantes, to build a dam along the Rambla del Carrizal. A dam doomed to failure. Money in abundance. In 1821, in the heat of the mining boom in the Sierra Almagrera of Almería, Diego María Madollel He created ‘Irrigation of Níjar’ and obtained tax exemptions from the crown. The idea was simple: build a stone structure 44 meters long and 35 meters high with the idea of irrigating more than 18,000 hectares in Campo de Níjar and Campohermoso. Over the next 40 years, Madollel would learn that there are many ways to fail. The first was almost immediate. The second took almost twenty years and the third, in 1842, with the constitution of the Níjar Reservoir Company, seemed to be the good one. The businessman gathered more than a thousand shareholders from Almería, Murcia, Málaga, Madrid and Valencia (people who had become rich from the mines, wanted to invest, but did not know much about the matter) and got the state to declare the project a ‘public utility’; but, five years later, the project could not get off the ground. It wouldn’t have started, but In 1848 the drought began. A persistent, sharp and prophetic drought… but that promoted the construction of the swamp. Madollel saw his opportunity and began selling water rights. The construction moved forward, the Murcian Jerónimo Ros took control of the construction and by 1857 not only the dam was finished, but also a very complex system of irrigation canals and pipes. Madollel had built a hydrological Ferrari: but the road was not in condition to go more than 20 kilometers per hour. How much everything goes wrong. Despite the very long development, the promoters did almost everything wrong. To begin with, they did not carry out hydrological studies of the area and that prevented them from realizing that the riverbed did not have enough flow to fill the reservoir or to irrigate 18,000 hectares. Furthermore, they did not realize that the regime of the boulevard was ‘torrential’: when it rains, it does so torrentially and that causes enormous amounts of sediment to be washed away. By 1871, the reservoir was completely blocked. The failure was enormous. Or almost. Because, although it is true that today the prey is a relic for hikersthe truth is that Madollel did have some vision. Today the Campo de Níjar is the epicenter of one of the largest seas of plastics in the country. The hydrological pressures are the same or worse, but this shows that it doesn’t matter how many times the climate twists our hand, the man is there to try again. Image | ANE In Xataka | The reservoir that would “never be filled” is opening its floodgates: 23 years later, the largest swamp in Western Europe is completely full
