The historic drought persists, desperation grows, and some municipalities, with the competition and the great responsibility of supplying drinking water to their neighbors regardless of their size and budget, decide to try their luck underground. In the towns, since ancient times, they have trusted the dowsers. Small municipalities, without the possibility of supplying themselves with drinking water by connecting to the large networks, play one last card with the construction of new wells.
This is the case of Riudecols (Baix Camp), with 1,200 registered residents and its water resources are low. Since the spring they have been dependent on tankers, now two or three a day. They contacted a dowser, Pere Sanromà, whom they had seen in the media, and he suggested that they dig a well at a point on the municipal soccer field.
The first well failed, with barely 1,000 liters per hour, and the second has pulled ahead, although the flow is low, 2,000 liters per hour (48,000 l per day).
“It hasn’t gone very well,” acknowledges Sanromà. “But it’s water! Before this drought, a 5,000-liter well was crap, but the situation is dramatic,” adds the dowser, an octogenarian, who says he has never experienced such a critical situation.
“Without this well we would surely have had to close the municipal swimming pool,” explains Beatriz Mayordomo, the mayoress of Riudecols. “The situation is extreme,” she adds. After consulting with Sanromà, another local dowser offered to look for water and, according to the mayoress, “marked the same point”.
In Masllorenç (Baix Penedès), also with the help of the dowser, they located a vein of water located some 220 meters deep. The town, with almost 600 residents, has been in the hands of the vats since the summer of 2022. The well, drilled next to the soccer field and they assure that with a very good flow (40,000 liters per hour), is not yet operational, pending of the latest analytics and permits. “If all goes well, it will start operating in September and we will be able to stop depending on the cisterns,” confides Joan Miró, its mayor.
Riudecanyes (Baix Camp), with a reservoir in its municipal area that is at 5% of its capacity, has passed a few days ago to the emergency phase of the drought plan of the Agència Catalana de l’Aigua (ACA). They have been looking for alternatives for weeks with the anguish of running out of water.
With the help of several dowsers from the same town, they are looking for new wells, but so far they have been unsuccessful. The City Council is preparing itself in case they should be supplied with tanker trucks, with water that they would mix with that of the swamp. “It was a situation for a long time that was expected to come if it did not rain,” lamented Ernest Roigé, mayor since June, in a letter addressed to residents.
There are dowsers who are working in anonymity, discreetly, after criticism from the scientific community warning that they act without any basis or real knowledge, also putting scarce groundwater at risk. Some dowsers do not want to show their faces. This is the case of the one that has changed, at least for now, the future of Alforja (Baix Camp).
The municipality, inside the Camp de Tarragona (2,000 inhabitants), spent a year in the hands of the vats. The City Council, without any connection either to the water from the Ebro mini-transfer, had to disburse 240,000 euros in one year to pay for the transport of drinking water in almost daily tanks.
In the midst of the drought, the media, as was the case with La Vanguardia, explained the critical situation of Alforja along with other municipalities. An octogenarian dowser from the province of Lleida saw the desperation of the residents of Alforja and began to review, from his house, the cartography of the municipality. He pointed to a point on the map, they say, where he believed a well could be made. A call from the dowser, who demanded to remain anonymous and did not charge a single euro, encouraged the Alforja City Council to try their luck. The supposed point to make the well was located on private land. With the owner’s permission, and after consulting with a local dowser, the City Council decided to dig the well. “We are much better, we are using the well we found, supplying the municipality with almost 180 cubic meters of water per day (180,000 liters). It allows us to see the summer in a different, more positive way, we are very happy, otherwise it would have been a very difficult summer”, says Joan Josep Garcia, mayor of Alforja. The well water has to be mixed with other own resources because it has nitrate levels slightly above the allowed limit.
The ACA, with jurisdiction over a public resource such as groundwater, is the one who must authorize the wells, whether they are on public or private property. The public entity has registered a notable increase in requests in the last two years. In 2021, it received 41 requests to legalize wells, almost seven times more than the six in 2020. In 2022, the last year with available data, 94 new well concessions were granted. Many individuals also turn to dowsers to save crops or find drinking water to supply homes outside urban centers. In many cases without success. “It’s our daily bread, we find more and more dead wells,” laments Sanromà, who has worked throughout his career for more than 60 town halls. He charges between 200 and 300 euros per well: “We are not yet aware of what is to come.”
