The Manzanares river in Madrid He is suffering an important flood of his flow for the last rains registered in the city. Emergencies has activated the yellow alert by rains, possible overflows and floods. In addition, the City Council does not rule out cutting some roads from the capital-the A-6, the M-30 and the M-40— for the unparalleled to this river. However, Madrid already knows what the waters get out of their channel and end up causing a disaster.
Manzanares looks little river. In the capital 33 bridges cross it And from all of them we see a modest water course (which was barely a thread at the end of the 20th century). Quevedo wrote that of “Manzanares, Manzanares, Rio Learn Arroyo” And they say that in the XIX a German diplomat “praised” the river saying that it was “navigable by car and horse”. And yet, although occasionally, He has been the protagonist of great floods.
Target on the right of Jarama, which in turn is a tributary of the Tagus, the Manzanares run entirely from the community of Madrid. Born in the Sierra de Guadarrama and, after passing through the state capital, it flows into the Jarama River, at the height of Rivas-VaciMadrid. They are in total 92 Modestos kilometers.
The Santillana reservoirs and brown regulate the Manzanares flow and in the capital five urban dams maintain a stable water level all the time. But before that all system worked, the river lacked control and was open to the raw and naked influence of weather, come on, of the rains that had a place above.
So yes, Madrid has known floods, but never as terrible as those of, for example, Valencia. Occasionally, Manzanares’s waters have become brave taking bridges, such as Account the Passion Blog by Madrid. He Puente de Toledo is a heir to three previous bridgeswhich, in less than a century, succumbed to the avenues.
Wooden and river bridges without channeling
Consulting the newspaper library, there is a first episode in April 1884. At that time, the magazine The Spanish and American Enlightenment He echoed a large flood and lamented that the City Council would not have taken actions to “regularize and channel the” Manzanares.
In 1906, another flood destroyed the green bridge of Florida, a wooden structure that rose very close to the current bridge of Queen Victoria. The Garrido bridge was also made of woodthat in 1910 it collapsed by the action of the waters.
Seven years later, again. This time the Manzanares swept a pedestrian catwalk that hung in the vicinity of the missing Prairie del Corregidor, in the area of San Antonio de la Florida. That meadow was flooded for several days.
In 1936, before the civil war broke out, the raging waters of Manzanares nearby were exceed the limit of the Bridge of the Republic (the one called Puente del Rey).
The pool the island was built on a natural island of the riverupstream of the bridge of the king, and was nothing when the flood of March 5, 1947. Its pools were completely flooded and the island on which the sports complex was built succumbed under the waters. Firefighters had to intervene to rescue, with pulloline, several employees who had been trapped.
The suffered M-30 Madrid
The Manzanares has not only taken bridges and swimming pools, has also flooded Barrios. In the Antonio López Street still reminds of the 1960s floodswhen the river overflowed. The same thing happened again in 1966 and who won it was the residents of Avenida del Manzanares, among the bridges of Segovia and Toledo.
The nuclear episode that hid the dictatorship
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In 1970 there was a discharge of radioactive material from the Juan Vigón National Nuclear Energy Center located in the University City. That discharge reached the channels of Jarama and the Tagus. We knew it time later because the dictatorship was responsible for hiding it. The contaminated sludge were buried in eight points of the Jarama basin. But it was done without signaling and today only four of the locations are known with certainty.
Although in 1995 the urban prey and the reservoirs of Santillana and El Pardo worked, that year there was a storm that dropped so much water that the channel of the Manzares as it passes through Madrid did not give a basty. Was June 24 and the waters flooded the M-30 (No, it was not yet buried). Several vehicles were trapped and the use of boats and divers to rescue their occupants was necessary.
Also in the M-30, In October 2006just when working in their underground, the rains exceeded the channel, waking the work, machinery included. Two years laterthe excess water of the river ended up flooding one of the brand new tunnels of the Circunvalación highway of the capital. The last great flood is August 2019 for the intense storms of that summer (as the photo above shows).
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