Pau Rodriguez

In the 34 years that Toni Quintana has been working his land, he can’t remember a drought like this one. At this point in the course, its 55 hectares of land should be covered with cereal, the winter crop, but without rain hardly anything grows. “We’re throwing money away,” he laments, leaning against an empty ditch. Water usually flows through this ditch in spring, when the Darnius reservoir opens its floodgates for the generous irrigation of thousands of hectares in the Alt Empordà region of Girona. But today that image seems to be a thing of the past.

The Alt Empordà is ground zero of the worst drought that Catalonia has experienced in its history. After three years of scarce rainfall, and with reservoirs at 17.7% of their capacity, the Generalitat assumes that in December it will have to officially declare an emergency and tighten restrictions for most of the Catalan population, including the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB).

While the worst-case scenario is being prepared and the Port of the Catalan capital is adapting to the possibility of bringing water in tankers, there are some 140,000 Catalans who are already living with this stage of maximum alert due to lack of reserves. This mainly concerns the residents of 34 municipalities in this northeastern region of Girona that depend on the aquifer of the Fluvià and Muga rivers and, above all, on the Darnius reservoir, which is at 14% of its capacity. It is not the entire region, but it is where the largest population centers are concentrated.

The water from both rivers supplies cities such as Figueres and coastal towns such as Roses and Castelló d’Empúries. According to the forecasts of the Catalan Water Agency (ACA), the reservoir has reserves for only eight to ten months, as long as the maximum expenditure per inhabitant decreed is met. A threshold of 200 liters per person per day, which however – with the latest data from October, the first month of the emergency restrictions – was exceeded by 16 of the 34 municipalities at risk.

Although there are no water cuts for households – a restriction that up to 70 other Catalan towns are experiencing, for different reasons – some towns in Alt Empordà have started to reduce the tap pressure. Fountains are closed, gardens cannot be irrigated and swimming pools cannot be filled, industrial consumption must be cut by 25% and agricultural irrigation has been eliminated altogether.

Some mayors are alarmed because they do not know what will happen if it does not rain in the coming months, especially in the towns that live off tourism and see a campaign that in 2023 they saved by the skin of their teeth in jeopardy.

“We are very worried because we don’t know what plan B is,” says Lluís Espadas, councilman for the environment in Roses. The municipality is home to 20,000 people, but in summer it reaches a floating population of almost 100,000. In Castelló they may reach 75,000. “This is not solved with four tankers, we are talking about a very important volume,” he adds.

The ACA points out that the Drought Plan will continue to be applied, which in the event of an “extreme” emergency would force a reduction in average consumption to 160 liters per inhabitant per day. For now, bringing water by boat to the Alt Empordà is out of the question. “We are looking at recovering some wells that were built during the last drought or opening new ones,” they say. For groundwater drilling alone, the ACA adds, 10 million euros have been earmarked, in addition to 50 million euros for other infrastructures to improve water supply.

Farmers run out of water for irrigation

“We farmers are the first to be hit by the drought and the last to receive attention from the administrations,” laments Quintana. He is the vice-president of the irrigation community of the right bank of the Muga River. On both sides of the riverbed there are some 4,500 hectares of arable land that are normally flooded with water in the summer, the most important season, to irrigate alfalfa and corn. This production is then converted into feed for local livestock. “This has been the case since the reservoir opened in 1969,” Quintana explains.

The landscape of the area has changed over the past two summers. Corn and alfalfa are no longer plentiful. In 2022, the drought forced a reduction in irrigation to 60% of the area, and in 2023, to 20%. In 2024, if it does not rain, there will not be a drop of water circulating in the irrigation ditches. “We will plant cereal and the little we harvest will be for our own cattle,” says Quintana, who has about 150 cows that right now are his “economic salvation.”

But his main concern is another. “It’s just that there’s no water under the ground either,” he notes. Its two wells have dried up. “It’s very serious, we are scared,” warns the farmer.

At 65 years of age, Quintana recognizes that the agricultural model of the area, based on “blanket” irrigation of the fields, may not be sustainable in the future. In a dry region, where the wind blows, with a basin – that of the Muga – very small and without high mountains where it snows, water has never been abundant. In addition, there are major consumers such as tourism and the numerous large-scale pig farms.

In addition, the climate emergency threatens worse and longer droughts. “Everything changes in this world and you can move forward with drip irrigation or sprinkler irrigation,” he says. Apart from the innovations, Quintana points the finger at the Administration for not undertaking many of the investments promised in 2008 after the last major drought.

Eye on gardens and tourism

Without cuts in tap water, life in drought emergency passes in the Alt Empordà without altering the daily life of the population. “The restrictions are not noticed at the social and individual level, so many people do what they want; if they want to water the garden, they water it. There is no effective supervision,” criticizes Arnau Lagresa. A geographer by profession, this resident of Figueres is spokesman for the naturalist organization Iaeden, which denounces that the current measures to alleviate the drought are “insufficient”. Proof of this is that 16 of the 34 municipalities did not comply with the established limits (and another 9 did not provide data at all).

On this issue, ACA sources explain that they are doing an “individualized follow-up” of municipal consumption and that they initially prefer to resort to injunctions rather than fines. For the time being, no sanctioning proceedings have been opened against any of the municipalities of the localities that exceed the threshold. “But they could be initiated over the next few weeks,” they warn.

As the maximum is an average of 200 liters per inhabitant per day, some municipalities shoot up because they house important infrastructures -an example is the town of Llers, which has the prison of the province of Girona-. Most tourist destinations are also above the permitted level, although for the time being there is no data to distinguish the uses of this sector from domestic uses, which has aroused complaints from environmental organizations.

Among those that double the permitted consumption is Perelada, which with its 1,800 inhabitants houses the core of the Suqué Mateu family’s empire: the Castell de Perelada with its casino, the brand new 18,000 m2 winery, and the Golf Club in whose complex extends an urbanization of dozens of villas.

Hence, all eyes were focused on this municipality when the excess consumption in drought began to be known. However, its mayor, Miquel Brugat, from Junts, denies the major and even assures that they have been “criminalized” by the Catalan Water Agency by putting them as an example of non-compliance.

“Nobody has called us to know the reality of the municipality,” says the mayor, who claims that consumption may be due to foreigners who have their second home in Perelada or retirees who live in the town but are not included in the census and alter the average. He also adds that the golf course is irrigated with reclaimed water.

The ACA organized a meeting with the town councils in mid-November emergency, but Brugat sees it as insufficient to address the casuistry of each village. At the municipal level, this mayor assures that they are complying with all prohibitions. But what happens in each house, he says, he cannot control.

“It is not being supervised, nor will it be, because we do not have the means to do so. If the Generalitat wants to help us with inspectors, let them come and we will give them a plan of the town,” declares the councilman, visibly angry. “Do they want me to go and see if they are watering gardens at four in the morning? Do they want a councilman to go?” he complains.

For the naturalist entities, however, there is no doubt that the excesses of municipalities such as Peralada come from the irrigation of gardens. “Obviously we cannot say whether it is due to a villa or a casino, but what we do know is that those towns with more consumption are the tourist towns and those with very high per capita incomes,” says Lagresa.

Perelada belongs to the municipalities that draw water from the aquifer of the Muga and Fluvià rivers, not from the reservoir. If they used to extract water at a depth of six meters, today they extract it at a depth of 15 meters. And yet they can feel fortunate, since almost the entire region is a vulnerable zone for nitrate contamination. In 10 of the 24 groundwater monitoring points, the water is unfit for human consumption due to contamination from slurry, which mainly comes from pig farms.

“It cannot be that the whole Empordà depends on the reservoir”.

At 20 kilometers from Perelada towards the coast, the Roses Town Hall is also looking at the sky with anguish. In their case, they claim that they are trying to control domestic consumption through meters. “We have detected some excesses and we are studying fines,” says councilman Lluís Espadas. The locality registered 221 liters per inhabitant per day in October, still above the permitted level. In addition, they explain that they have requested a savings plan from “large consumers”: hotels, yacht clubs and water parks.

Aware that most of its population lives from the tourist season, Espadas asks not to go to the extreme of making water cuts next summer. “If for any citizen it is a drama, imagine for a tourist business, the damage can be brutal,” he warns.

But Espadas knows that there may be no other solution. “It cannot be that the whole Alt Empordà depends on the reservoir. We are staking everything on one card. Some older people used to say ‘woe betide the day the reservoir runs out of water’…. And we used to laugh. Well, it seems that day has arrived”, concludes the mayor of Roses.

For some experts, the Alt Empordà is simply a region whose economic model demands more water than it will be able to have in the future. Without desalination and water treatment plants that can come to the rescue (as is currently the case in the basins that supply Girona and Barcelona), this area will continue to be at the mercy of the rain.

“In the short term, there is little to do, but in the medium term we should increase water reuse and rethink the agricultural and tourism model,” diagnoses Annelies Broekman, industry consultant and researcher in Water and Global Change at the CREAF center. No matter how efficient irrigation and water harvesting systems are in hotels, he argues, “efficiency has limits.”

From his farmhouse in Figueres, next to the cereal fields that have yet to sprout, Quintana assumes the future with resignation. He knows that next season will be bad, but also that this drought will pass. “Then, we will see if all the investments that are being promised now will be carried out or if the politicians will quickly forget about it,” he concludes.