The church of Sant Romà de Sau, the village flooded in the 1950s to build a dam. Photo: David Levene/The Guardian
Magdalena Coromina tapped her walking stick on the hard ground and looked up at a church that was meant to be flooded. Six decades ago, when engineers built the reservoir in which it stood, they flooded the town of Sant Romà de Sau and drowned the buildings. The rains that quenched the region's thirst had kept the ruins covered.
But that world no longer exists. Hit by a drought that has dried the reservoir to 1% of its capacity, the remains of the village have come back into view. Crumbling stone structures now stand on cracked ground among ashen plants. The church, whose spire rose above the surface during dry periods, today stands high above the waterline.
"It makes me so sad," said Coromina, an 85-year-old from the nearby town of Ripoll, who came to see the ruins on an unusually warm afternoon in February. She remembered the rain and snow during the winter when she was a girl. "Now? Nothing."
Catalonia, a wealthy region in northeastern Spain, is ravaged by a drought that is killing crops, stifling the economy and limiting the lives of 6 million people living under emergency measures. Scientists don't know what role the climate crisis has played in shrinking the region's water supply, but they say the struggle to keep the taps turning will be one that engulfs southern Europe as fossil fuel pollution warms the country and parts of it dry out.
The western coasts of the Mediterranean will be particularly affected by increased evaporation, shorter rainy seasons and less snow cover in the mountains, 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. In early February, after more than a thousand days of drought, the regional government extended restrictions to Barcelona and other municipalities. Together with the Spanish Ministry of Ecology, it has announced plans to invest almost half a billion euros in desalination plants to make salt water suitable for taps. Officials also want to ship drinking water from wetter parts of the country and double aid money for emergency work on the leaking pipe network.
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But as they wait for rain to fall and infrastructure to improve, Catalans are divided over how to share the remaining water. The dilemma has pitted locals, farmers and tourists against each other as they fight over a resource that is becoming scarcer by the day.
"It is difficult to avoid these reactions because when people suffer, they have to respond in some way," said Meritxell Serret, the Catalan foreign minister and former agriculture minister. "A lot needs to be done - in every sector - and we are aware that we cannot demand that they do this overnight."
Farmers, who use a third of the water in the inner basin where most Catalans live, face the greatest pressure to reduce their consumption. The government has 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 "injustice" of the restrictions and the impact of the drought have left farmers feeling powerless, says Albert Grassot, president of a local irrigation community. "It is a feeling of powerlessness, weakness and anger."
Driving around his rice farm near the medieval town of Pals, Grassot said the drought was weighing him down more than the coronavirus pandemic and energy crisis. If there is no rain in the next three months, his family will not be able to sow the first year since his great-great-grandfather began working the land.
The effects will extend beyond his own farm, he added. Rice fields use a lot of water because the grain grows in flooded fields. But in Pals, just three kilometers from the coast, this age-old practice helps prevent salt water from seeping inland and wreaking havoc on other crops and ecosystems.
In Barcelona, where the public fountains are dry and the beach showers are closed, the burden of drought is lighter than in the villages but still hangs heavily over the city. Posters in metro stations warn in stern letters that "water does not fall from the sky".
After a previous drought hit Barcelona in 2008, the city invested in recycling wastewater, desalinating seawater and convincing citizens to save more drinking water. Her efforts have increased supply and reduced the city's water demand to some of the lowest levels in Europe.
Andrew Ross, a geographer at Portland State University who has co-authored a book on water politics in cities around the world, said Barcelona had led the way in many respects, but its ambitions still fell short of what was needed . "If even Barcelona experiences this kind of crisis - given its policies - it shows the rest of the world that it is time to take action," he said.
Activists complain that the government is unwilling to crack down on tourists, who come in the hottest months of the year and use on average more than twice as much water as locals. Barcelona welcomed 10 million holidaymakers 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 can't fill it before the summer, they fear attendance will drop.
So far, the tourism sector has experienced little pressure to invest in structural changes to save water. Showers are often the biggest consumers of water in a hotel and the 'grey water' that flows down the drain can be easily treated if kept separate from sewage, says Gianluigi Buttiglieri, a scientist at the Catalan Institute for Water Research. But without laws mandating this, he added, "there is no incentive for them to do so."
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 that it could be treated with gray water in a tank in the basement before being piped back to guest bathrooms.
The hotel is testing a separate system to filter it through stacked layers of plant-rich soil before disinfecting it. According to a study by Samba that Buttiglieri co-authored last year, such a system would pay for itself within ten years.
Laura Pérez, a hotel manager responsible for sustainability, said that while the Samba had also been hit by restrictions on swimming pools - which under Spanish law cannot be filled with treated gray water - it was more resistant to drought than other hotels. "It doesn't bother us as much because we need less water."
A similar concept can be seen on the outskirts of Manresa, a small industrial town further inland. Pol Huguet, a councilor responsible for the environment, has started rewilding six hectares of land near an abandoned nightclub to make the area more diverse and better able to withstand extreme weather conditions. But the drought has delayed the project by at least a year. The young trees have not grown large enough for sheep to arrive without the animals eating them.
Huguet pointed to a forest behind him and said humans have changed the landscape so much that it has become too vulnerable to hot, dry weather. "A wildfire can spread at tremendous speed if there is homogeneity - with all the trees at the same height, very dense - and that is what we have here."
Officials share his concerns. Wary of forests turned into tinderboxes, the Catalan government announced on Friday it would strengthen its fire prevention units in February, four months ahead of schedule. In many parts of Catalonia, drought is increasing the risk of forest fires by driving death and decay of plant material to levels "never seen before in scale and distribution."
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But while the effects of the drought are in many ways unprecedented, locals say the concept is one that Catalans know well.
In Manresa, residents held a festival on Saturday to celebrate the construction of a controversial medieval canal called La Séquia - Spanish for drought - 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 moved the looms of the once-thriving textile industry.
But a local bishop who owned mills upriver fought against efforts to build them and excommunicated the entire town in the 14th century because he feared diverting the water would affect 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, staring at the dry vegetation before him. "Now it's happening again."
