Andalucia’s water supply being ‘stolen’

PRECIOUS water is exported from the dry lands of Spain in millions of cubic kilometres each year. We receive it in Ireland in, for example, tomatoes, which are probably 70% water.

In Andalucia, snow falls on the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, and January and February usually brings rain. The rivers swell, tanks fill and, in the growing season, irrigation canals bring water to the land. The precious water is, however, being stolen — that is the word the locals used in a protest march held in the town of Órgiva last weekend.

Developers along the coast areusing precious Alpujarra water to supply new apartment blocks and swimming pools, and to create golf courses and keep them green. Local people fear for the lives of the communities of the mountain villages.

Another huge dam is proposed for the Río Trevélez. The water table is falling. The community fears that the springs that feed the rivers will burst out of the hillsides no more.

The watercourses descending from the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada are the arteries and veins of the Alpujarra, where we are spending six months. It is a region unique in Spain, indeed in Europe, acknowledged by the fact that it is a World Heritage Site, a Biosphere Reserve and includes most of the SierraNevada National Park.

The Alpujarra was made beautiful by nature but it was made unique by man, not only in the white villages of clay-roofed houses and the green terraces hewn out of the slopes but in the acequias, the water channels, that distribute water across the land and make it all work.

The human landscape, with itsancient mule paths, terraces and chestnut groves, was created not by Spaniards but by Mountain Berbers from the Atlas Range in North Africa, who settled on it during the Moorish period, and worked it for more than 700 years. They built 2,000 kilometres of acequias, planted the terraces with olives and fruit trees, built threshing floors and winnowing platforms, and water mills to grind their corn. Successful communities established themselves all over these mountains. Berbers look very much like ourselves. Some commentators believe we are of the same stock, part of a prehistoric pan-Atlantic civilisation.

The Alpujarra is also famous historically; it was the last Moorish kingdom to survive, the only redoubt still unconquered when the Moors of Granada surrendered the city in 1492 and chose conversion to Christianity rather than expulsion from Spain.

However, contrary to the termsof surrender, they found their language, music, festivals and customsproscribed and, in 1598, theyrebelled. Their leaders fled to the Alpujarra and there held out for a few more years.

What we have heard of as the glorious re-conquest of Spain by the Reyes Catholicos, Ferdinand andIsabella, wasn’t in fact, a sweeping victory but a series of small wars, fought, over decades, by local Spanish or Hispanisised Moors against the Moorish kingdoms. Al-Andaluz,Andalucia, with its treasures of art and architecture, its glorious cities of Cordoba, Granada and Sevilla, was the last to survive. When northern Europeans were still semi-barbaric, Al-Andaluz was the flower of Arab civilisations, famous for its libraries, scholars and mathematicians throughout the then known world.

When the Alpujarra was finally conquered, the entire population, 40,000 farmers and their families, was deported to northern Spain and settled as labourers on the land. They left behind their productive terraces and fruit trees. This was ethnic cleansing on a grand scale.

The only exception was that two Moorish families would remain in each village to explain the art of breeding silkworms, and the irrigation system. In the following years, over 12,000 Spanish peasant families from the mountains of Galicia and Asturias were granted the Alpujarra farms. According to Gerald Brenan’s definitive book, South from Granada, they occupied just 250 villages; 400 hamlets were left to fall into ruin.

In time, the hardy peasants from the northern mountains thrived. They levelled the mosques, but kept the water channels open.

This springtime, as every springtime for centuries, their descendants will walk every kilometre of the 500 kilometres of these waterways that survive, and clear them of winter leaves.

Water will flow to irrigate the crops in the dry spring and arid summer. And their livelihood, and culture, will survive another year.

These days, such cultures are threatened everywhere. Self-sustaining ecologies which took thousands of years to evolve are being destroyed daily. If a world cataclysm comes, these are the very areas that offer the best chance for human survival.

Jacuzzis in apartments, strawberries in December and golf courses in deserts will soon be forgotten then.