PRECIOUS RESOURCE

Thou­sands have lived with­out love, not one with­out water. – British Amer­i­can poet W H Auden.

The skies will open now that I have writ­ten these words. How I wish. Please may it rain solidly for weeks on end, now and through the win­ter.

The farm’s nor­mally re­li­able well has run dry and we have had to patch to­gether pipes and ca­bles to the spring high up the land to keep the flow going. The water di­viner is com­ing next week. We will search for water some­where else on the land and try to carry on. In­cred­i­bly, the olive trees and the vines are not suc­cumb­ing, but the ar­be­quina olives are small and the yield will be poor.

While clouds have burst just over the moun­tain down on the coast at Tar­rag­ona and in the nearby city of Reus and ad­join­ing farms, com­mu­ni­ties – so near and yet so far and still nowhere near enough – we have not had a de­cent down­pour here since July and it is deeply trou­bling. We see the grey smudge of tor­rent be­neath dis­tant iron clouds, but mois­ture has for the most part evaded us in our lit­tle val­ley.

We headed to the UK in our work van in mid-Oc­to­ber to visit olive oil cus­tomers, fam­ily etc., and hap­pily re­turned home from that frac­tured and dys­func­tional is­land (don’t get me started) via the ferry from Portsmouth to Bil­bao. Back in Iberia we headed for Zaragoza and then south through Aragon to Caspe, past trac­tors trailed by plumes of dust as they har­rowed the parched ter­rain. We dropped down through tin­der wood­land to cross the mighty Mequinenza reser­voir also known as Mar de Aragon, which has a coast-line of more than 500 kilo­me­tres after the Ebre was dammed in 1965. It was vir­tu­ally empty.

The re­cur­ring and deep­en­ing Iber­ian drought plight is no se­cret. Reser­voirs have been at their low­est lev­els since 1995 and al­most 20 per­cent below the av­er­age for the past 10 years. The stub­born cor­ner­stones of homes and streets of drowned farms and vil­lages rise from the dead. It is 14 years now since the Barcelona water emer­gency, when water was im­ported from France. That cri­sis was com­pounded by a fierce drought in 2005 be­cause the rivers and reser­voirs had not re­cov­ered any­where near enough to sus­tain the city through an­other emer­gency.

So we look to the skies every day. We strug­gle through some­how and try and fail not to think the un­think­able. It will take so much for the rivers and lakes to re­plen­ish. Heaven for­bid that 2023 is equally arid.

Daily I de­scend the long lad­der into the shaft of the spring to check the solar pump and the level of the water. It is nearly a year now since it was high enough to reach the exit pipe through which it can flow nat­u­rally down to the bassa and farm­house. So a new well it will have to be. Un­less, I hope, my words and wor­ries have been washed away by the time you are read­ing this.

I am not hold­ing my breath.