The contrast between areas of the Iberian Peninsula with an abundance of water and others that are almost desert due to the drought This week can be summarized with two terms that are somewhere between poetic and dramatic: the one known to tourists as Sea of Aragon -Mequinenza reservoir, in the Ebro– has grown in just one week in 106 hectometercubic s, half the water of everything a year of Tajo-Segura transfersin whose destination we speak of “dead bottom” swamps.
Because the problem does not only lie in rainfall or droughtsince there is also a difference abysmal in the ability of the water infrastructures in these basins, so that when it rains they are not recharged with much the same volumes.
In the Ebro demarcation, according to the latest official figures from the Ministry on embalses.net, a total of 5,191 hm3 is currently accumulated, 66.5% of its possibilities, which theoretically would exceed 7,800 hm3 if all its reservoirs were full at the moment. 100%. And in just one week, they have earned 345, which more than doubles the entire volume dammed in the Segura (166).
In the Tagus there is still more water and more could fit, 6,192 hm3 (they are at 56%) and more than 11,000 hectometers of maximum. Obviously, these levels have never been reached or they would have caused a catastrophe. But they are at astronomical distances from what they could dam in the Segura, which currently has 166 hm3 – 14.5% – and with several reservoirs in a “dead bottom” situation even below 10%. Even if there were floods or their infrastructure were artificially recharged to the maximum, at most they would reach about 1,140 hectometres, less water than Mequinenza has right now and a little more than what Entrepeñas and Buendía add up to (1,024), the two reservoirs that supply the flow. of the transfers from the Tagus to the Segura.
In short, many decades ago facilities designed to collect water resources were built in specific places in Spain, thinking about rainfall records, while in the fertile fields with the most hours of sunshine per year -Murcia, Alicante and Almería – there are hardly any such large deposits and the farmers depend of the transfers.
At times like the current one and last spring, when the floods of the Ebro once again caused floods, the reason for the nostalgia with which some still remember that National Hydrological Plan (PHN) repealed two decades ago by the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who contemplated another transfer from Aragon to the south, as exists towards Catalonia.
Meanwhile, this antagonism will persist between the reservoirs dying from drought and the Sea of Aragon, the largest body of fresh water on the Iberian Peninsula, with 500 kilometers of coast interior and nautical activities. On the horizon of 2027, furthermore, with visible cuts to the transfers from the Tagus to Segura (by half) and two river cruise projects in Guadalajara, with the construction of two leisure centers.
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