by Magdalena Coromina hit the hard ground with her walking stick and looked up at a church that was meant to be under water. Six decades ago, when engineers built the reservoir in which it was located, they flooded the town of Sant Romà de Sau and drowned its buildings. The rain that left the region thirsty kept the ruins covered.
But that world no longer exists. After being hit by a drought that dried the reservoir to 1% of its capacity, the remains of the village have resurfaced. Crumbling stone structures now sit on cracked soil among ash plants. Today the church, whose spire was above the surface during dry periods, is high above the waterline.
“It makes me so sad,” said Coromina, an 85-year-old from the nearby city of Ripoll who came to see the ruins on an unusually warm February afternoon. She remembered rain and snow during the winter when she was a girl. “Now? Nothing.”
Catalonia, a rich region in northeastern Spain, is in the grip of a drought that is killing its crops, choking its economy and curtailing the lives of 6 million people who live under emergency measures. Scientists don’t know what role the climate crisis has played in shrinking the region’s water supply, but they say fossil fuel pollution will sweep southern Europe and dry up parts of it.
Western Mediterranean coasts, in particular, will be hit by increased evaporation, shorter rainy seasons and less mountain snow cover, said Stefano Materia, a climate scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre. In cities such as Valencia in Spain, Marseille in France and Genoa in Italy – where industry and tourism are already putting pressure on scarce water resources – “this is likely to increase vulnerability”.
Catalonia offers a glimpse of that future. At the beginning of February, after more than 1,000 days of drought, the regional government extended restrictions to cover Barcelona and other municipalities. Together with the Spanish Ministry of Ecology, she announced plans to invest almost half a billion euros in desalination plants to make brackish water fit for the tap. Officials also want to send drinking water from wetter parts of the country and double the aid money for emergency works on the leaking pipe network.
But as they wait for rain to fall and infrastructure to improve, Catalans are divided over how to share the remaining water. This dilemma has pitted locals, farmers and tourists against each other as they fight for a resource that is becoming scarcer by the day.
“It’s hard to avoid these reactions, because when people suffer, they have to react in some way,” said Meritxell Serret, Catalonia’s foreign minister and former agriculture minister. “There is a lot to do – in all sectors – and we understand that we cannot demand them from day to day.”
Farmers, who use one third of the water in the internal basin where most Catalans live, are under the most pressure to reduce their consumption. The government ordered them to use 80% less water for irrigation and 50% less water for livestock, while asking the industry to reduce water use by 25%.
The “unfairness” of the restrictions and the effects of the drought have left farmers feeling powerless, said Albert Grassot, president of a local irrigation community. “It is a feeling of impotence, weakness and rage.”
Driving through his rice farm near the medieval town of Pals, Grassot said the drought weighed more heavily on his mind than the coronavirus pandemic and the energy crisis. If it doesn’t rain in the next three months, he said, his family won’t be able to plant seeds for the first year since his great-great-grandfather started farming the land.
The effects will go beyond his own farm, he said. Rice paddies use a lot of water because the grain grows in flooded fields. But in Pals, which is only 3km from the coast, the centuries-old practice helps to stop salt water from affecting crops and other ecosystems.
In Barcelona, where public fountains are dry and beach showers have stopped, the burden of drought is lighter than in the villages but it still hangs heavily across the city. Posters in subway stations warn in sharp letters that “water does not come from the sky”.
After a previous drought that hit Barcelona in 2008, the city invested in recycling waste water, desalinating sea water and convincing citizens to save more drinking water. Her efforts increased the supply and the city’s demand for water fell to some of the lowest levels in Europe.
Andrew Ross, a geographer at Portland State University who co-wrote a book on water politics in cities around the world, said Barcelona was ahead in many ways but its ambitions still fell short of what was needed. “Even when Barcelona has this kind of crisis – given its policies – it shows the rest of the world that it’s time to act,” he said.
Activate a complaint that the government is willing to crack down on the tourists, who come for the hottest months of the year and on average use more than twice as much water as the locals. Barcelona welcomed 10 million people on holiday in 2022 – making it one of the most visited cities in Europe – and the sector represents 12% of the Catalan economy.
But hotels are starting to feel the heat. In the beachside party town of Lloret de Mar, a group of owners have asked the Catalan government for permission to buy a mobile desalination plant to avoid restrictions on their swimming pools. If they cannot fill them before the summer, they fear that the number of visitors will decrease.
Until now, there has been little pressure on the tourism industry to invest in structural changes to save water. Showers are often the biggest users of water in a hotel and the “grey water” that goes down the drain can be easily treated if it is kept separate from the sewage, said Gianluigi Buttiglieri, a scientist at the Catalan Water Research Institute. But without laws to mandate this, he said, “there’s no incentive for them to do that”.
The Samba, a three-star hotel in the center of Lloret, is one of the few hotels in the Mediterranean that uses separate pipes. During renovation work 25 years ago, management split the hotel’s pipes so they could treat gray water in a tank in the basement before piping it back to guest bathrooms.
The hotel is testing a unique system to filter it through stacked layers of plant-rich soil before disinfecting it. According to a study by the Samba co-author Buttiglieri last year, such a system would pay for itself within ten years.
Laura Pérez, hotel manager responsible for sustainability, said that although the Samba was also hit by restrictions on swimming pools – which under Spanish law cannot be filled with treated gray water – it was more resilient against drought than other hotels. “We don’t suffer as much, because we need less water.”
A similar concept can be seen on the outskirts of Manresa, a small industrial city further inland. Pol Huguet, a consultant responsible for the environment, has started reforesting six hectares of land near an abandoned disco to make the area more diverse and resilient against extreme weather. But the drought delayed the project by at least a year. The saplings have not grown tall enough for sheep to reach without being eaten by the animals.
Pointing to a forest behind him, Huguet said humans have changed the landscape in ways that have made it too vulnerable to hot, dry weather. “A wildfire can progress very quickly if there is homogeneity – with all the trees at the same height, very close together – and that’s what we have here.”
Officials share his concerns. Wary of forests that have turned into tinderboxes, the Catalan government announced on Friday that it would strengthen its fire prevention units in February, four months earlier than planned. In many parts of Catalonia, he said, the drought is raising the risk of wildfires by taking the death and decay of plant material to “unprecedented levels of size and distribution”.
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But while the effects of the drought are in many ways unprecedented, locals say the concept is well known to Catalans.
In Manresa on Saturday, residents held a festival to celebrate the construction of a controversial medieval canal called La Séquia that connected the town to the Llobregat River six centuries ago. Built after a series of famines, the canal irrigated Manresa’s crops and later displaced the crops of its once thriving textile industry.
But a local bishop who owned mills upstream made efforts to build it and banished the entire town in the 14th century, worried that diverting the water would reduce his profits. Legend has it that he changed his mind after taking a flash of light as a sign that God wanted to build the canal.
“Water wars have happened many times in history, in many places,” said Huguet, staring at the dry vegetation in front of him. “Now it’s happening again.”
