HERITAGE

Watering the Farmland of Spain: Storied Past and Troubled Present

The dilemma facing the country that is both Europe’s fruit and vegetable garden, and home to the continent’s only desert

An acequia with its mechanical sluice gate (Photo by Vicenç Salvador Torres Guerola, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

At the end of my road there runs a concrete conduit. The modest, intermittent stream of water that flows along it belies the grandeur of its name: la Acequia Madre, or ‘Mother Channel’.

Yet this seemingly inconsequential infrastructure does indeed form part of a vast network that criss-crosses much of the country, dating back well over a thousand years to the Moorish colonisation of Visigothic Spain.

Although the rest of Europe may think of its southernmost country as a dry land of unrelenting sunshine, to the desert-dwelling Moors who crossed over from North Africa in 711 CE, it was a green paradise. A paradise they were determined to preserve and enhance to its fullest. Hence the importance given to water features at the most magnificent architectural accomplishment of Al-Andalus: the Alhambra palace in Granada.

But water was above all for practical purposes — to feed the nation, then as now, with 80% of Spain’s water resources dedicated to agriculture. And the Moorish settlers, with their recent memory of parched…