Magdalena Coromina tapped the hard ground with her cane and looked at the church that was supposed to be underwater. Sixty years ago, when engineers were building the reservoir in which it sits, they flooded the town of Sant Romà de Sau, submerging buildings. The rains that quenched the thirst of the region covered the ruins.
But that world no longer exists. The ruins of the village, hit by a drought that dried the reservoir to 1% of its capacity, have resurfaced. Crumbling stone structures now stand on cracked soil among ashen plants. The church, whose tower used to rise above the surface during dry periods, stands well above the water level today.
“This makes me very sad,” said Coromina, 85, from the nearby town of Ripoll, who came to see the ruins on an unusually hot February afternoon. He remembered the rain and snow in the winter months when he was a child. “Now? Nothing.”
Catalonia, a wealthy region in northeastern Spain, is in the grip of a drought that is killing its crops, stifling its economy and restricting the lives of 6 million people living under emergency measures. Scientists don’t know what role the climate crisis is playing in reducing the region’s water supply, but they say the struggle to keep the taps running will wreak havoc on southern Europe as fossil fuel pollution warms it and dries out parts of it.
Stefano Materia, a climate scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre, said the western coast of the Mediterranean would be particularly affected by increased evaporation, shorter rainy seasons and less mountain snow cover. “This will likely increase vulnerability” 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.
Catalonia offers a glimpse into this future. At the beginning of February, after more than 1,000 days of drought, the regional government extended restrictions to Barcelona and other municipalities. Spain, together with its ministry of ecology, has announced plans to invest around half a billion euros in desalination plants to make salt water suitable for tapping. Authorities also want to send drinking water from the country’s wetlands and double aid money for emergency work on leaky pipe networks.
But while they wait for rain to fall and infrastructure to improve, Catalans are divided on how to share the remaining water. This dilemma has pitted locals, farmers and tourists against each other as they fight over a resource that is becoming increasingly scarce with each passing day.
“It is difficult to avoid these reactions, because when people suffer they have to react somehow,” said Meritxell Serret, Catalonia’s foreign minister and former agriculture minister. “There is a lot that needs to be done in every industry, and we recognize that we cannot demand that they do it from one day to the next.”
Farmers, who use a third of the water in the inland basin where most Catalans live, face the greatest pressure to reduce their consumption. The government ordered them to use 80% less water for irrigation and 50% less for livestock, and asked the industry to reduce water use by 25%.
Albert Grassot, chairman of a local irrigation society, said the “injustice” of the restrictions and the effects of the drought were leaving farmers feeling powerless. “It is a feeling of impotence, weakness and anger.”
Passing through his rice farm near the medieval town of Pals, Grassot said the drought weighed more on his mind than the coronavirus outbreak and 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 tilling the land.
He added that the impacts will extend beyond his own farm. Rice fields use a lot of water because the grains grow in flooded fields. But at Pals, just 3 kilometers from the coast, the centuries-old practice helps prevent saltwater from seeping inland and damaging other crops and ecosystems.
In Barcelona, where fountains have dried up and beach showers have been closed, the burden of drought is lighter than in the villages but still heavy on the city. Posters in metro stations warn in harsh letters that “water does not fall from the sky”.
Following the previous drought that hit Barcelona in 2008, the city invested in recycling wastewater, desalinating seawater and persuading citizens to save more drinking water. Their efforts increased supply and reduced the city’s water demand to the lowest levels in Europe.
Portland State University geographer Andrew Ross, who co-authored a book on water policies in cities around the world, said Barcelona is leading the way in many ways, but its goals still fall short of what is needed. “If even Barcelona is experiencing this kind of crisis, given its policies, it shows the rest of the world that it’s time to act,” he said.
Activists complain that the government is reluctant to crack down on tourists who come for the hottest months of the year and use, on average, more than twice as much water as locals. Barcelona will welcome 10 million holidaymakers in 2022, making it one of the most visited cities in Europe, and the sector accounts for 12% of the Catalan economy.
But hotels are starting to feel the heat. A group of property owners in the beachside party town of Lloret de Mar have asked the Catalan government for permission to buy a mobile desalination plant to avoid restrictions on swimming pools. They fear that if they cannot fill these places before the summer, the number of visitors may decrease.
So far the tourism industry has faced little pressure to invest in structural changes to save water. Gianluigi Buttiglieri, a scientist at the Catalan Institute for Water Research, said the biggest users of water in a hotel are usually showers, and the “grey water” flowing down the drain can be easily treated if kept separate from the sewer. But without laws to mandate it, “there’s nothing to encourage them to do it,” he added.
Samba, a three-star hotel in the center of Lloret, is one of the few hotels in the Mediterranean that uses separate pipes. During renovations 25 years ago, management disconnected the hotel’s pipes so it could purify gray water in a basement tank before returning it to guests’ bathrooms.
The hotel is testing a separate system to filter it through plant-rich soil layers before disinfecting it. Such a system would pay for itself within a decade, according to a study on Samba that Buttiglieri co-authored last year.
Hotel manager Laura Pérez, responsible for sustainability, said Samba was also affected by restrictions on swimming pools that cannot be filled with treated gray water under Spanish law, but it is more drought-resistant than other hotels. “We don’t suffer as much because we need less water.”
It is possible to see a similar concept further inland, on the outskirts of Manresa, a small industrial city. Environment councilor Pol Huguet has begun rewilding six hectares of land near an abandoned disco to make the area more diverse and resilient to extreme weather. However, drought delayed the project by at least a year. The young trees did not grow large enough for the sheep to arrive before the animals ate them.
Pointing to the forest behind him, Huguet said humans had altered the landscape in ways that made it vulnerable to hot, dry weather. “If there is uniformity, if all the trees are the same height and very dense, a forest fire can move at tremendous speed, and that’s what we have here.”
Authorities share his concerns. Wary of forests turning into tinderboxes, the Catalan government announced on Friday that it would strengthen fire prevention units in February, four months earlier than planned. In many parts of Catalonia, drought has increased the risk of wildfires by increasing the death and decay of plant matter to levels “never before seen in terms of extent and distribution”, it said.
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But while the effects of the drought are unprecedented in many ways, locals say it is a concept Catalans know well.
In Manresa on Saturday, residents held a festival to celebrate the construction of a controversial medieval canal called La Séquia, which connected the town to the Llobregat River six centuries ago. Built after a series of famines, the canal irrigated Manresa’s crops and later carried the looms of its once-thriving textile industry.
But in the 14th century a local bishop who owned mills upriver fought against efforts to build it and excommunicated the entire town; He was worried that diverting the water would hurt his profits. Legends say that he changed his mind after seeing a flash of light as a sign that God wanted the canal built.
“Water wars have happened many times in history, in many places,” Huguet said, looking at the dry vegetation in front of him. “Now it’s happening again.”