Spain Withers Under Heat Wave and Drought

Spain is suffering its worst drought in more than half a century. Rivers are withering, vital crops have been scorched to death, and drinking water is being rationed just as the country hits its peak tourist season.

Fatal forest fires have raced through thousands of parched acres, and a heat wave in much of southern Europe has put hospitals and emergency-care workers on alert.

With poor water management the norm, the crisis is only going to worsen, experts and officials warn.

“It is very probable that next year will also be a dry year,” Environment Minister Cristina Narbona said. “A new drought cycle [of several years] could be starting.”

Agricultural losses have been put at nearly $2 billion, at least a quarter of that in the southern Andalusia region, where Spain’s olive groves are starting to suffer the same devastation that has so far caused the loss of tons of wheat, barley, sugar beets and other vegetables.

Cows and sheep are also threatened, farm unions say, as are wild animals. Flamingos, storks, boars and the endangered Iberian lynx in Spain’s Donana and other national parks are said to be suffering from serious dehydration, which could interfere with their reproductive and migratory habits.

Portugal and parts of France and Italy also have been hit by drought this season. But the problems in Spain, which has one of the highest per capita water consumption rates in Europe, are compounded by a construction boom and big-business agriculture that Narbona and others say irrigates inefficiently.

Sprawling apartment complexes, fancy resorts and water-guzzling golf courses are sprouting along Spain’s arid southern coastlines at a frantic pace. A record 700,000 homes were reportedly built last year, and with them, thousands of illegal wells.

The crisis is chronic; southern, Mediterranean Spain has been parched for centuries. But demand has soared during Spain’s rapid growth of the last couple of decades and the modernization of its economy, said Jose Antonio Sotelo, a scientist with the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid.

This winter registered the lowest rainfall since 1947, when records were first kept, the Spanish National Meteorological Institute says. In the driest parts, such as Andalusia and the rural western region of Extremadura, rainfall was less than half of normal.

Spain’s water shortages are also a function of pricing.

“Wasting water is cheap,” said Julio Barea of Spanish Greenpeace. “Nobody would leave a light on [in Spain] because electricity is expensive. But few care if they leave a hose running.”

Many farmers still irrigate by flooding their orchards and fields. Recycling and conservation are rare.

Town officials from Catalonia to La Mancha are squabbling over allocation of water, with huge demonstrations staged over the last few weeks by farmers, consumers and environmental activists.

Seven of Spain’s 17 provinces have closed or restricted swimming pools, fountains and the watering of public and private gardens and yards this summer. Madrid’s residents were appalled recently to learn that the city was using drinking water on the greens of its parks. After a newspaper expose, officials said the practice had been halted.

Farms, not individual households, use most of Spain’s water. By most estimates, agriculture accounts for at least 75% of water use, but only a small fraction of the GDP.

One of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s first actions upon taking office last year was to suspend a $15-billion water plan that, among other things, would have diverted part of the Ebro River, Spain’s longest, from the more lush north to the barren south.

Although developers and farmers were eager to see the plan enacted, ecologists and numerous hydrologists were highly critical of it, saying it would create an environmental disaster without solving shortages.

The Socialist government has been slow, however, to enact alternative solutions. No curbs on building have been placed, nor has the government succeeded in imposing fines on those who waste water. Local jurisdictions are allowed to write most water-related rules, making it difficult to craft a national policy.

To fight the drought, Narbona has set aside $400 million for 20 new desalination plants, emergency wells and more recycling.

She touched off a veritable water war in July when she agreed to divert a small portion of water from reservoirs in the Castilla-La Mancha region to the Murcia area in southeastern Spain. Residents in Castilla-La Mancha complained bitterly that they were quenching the thirst of golfers; farmers in Murcia said they desperately needed water for their citrus groves, and grumbled that the amount being diverted was insufficient.

Narbona acted after Finland complained that lettuce imported from Murcia had touched off a salmonella outbreak. Murcian farmers acknowledged they sometimes irrigated with untreated sewage water but angrily denied that their lettuce was contaminated by fecal matter.

With tempers and temperatures escalating, and the Environment Ministry predicting no rain until September, the goal now, as the El Pais newspaper put it, is holding back the desert.

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Special correspondent Cristina Mateo-Yanguas contributed to this report.