Following the last major drought 15 years ago, in the midst of a political debate about whether it was a good idea to bring water from the Rhône and make an emergency transfer from the Ebro to Barcelona and the pleas of the then Minister of Medi Environment, Francesc Baltasar, to la Moreneta to make it rain, the entrepreneur Marc Álvarez saw the wolf’s ears.
Their modus vivendi, the water of the Sau reservoir, was decreasing in level. “The reservoir then was at 10% or 12% of its capacity,” he recalls. He thought that the company he had founded in 2003, dedicated solely to kayak navigation, had to diversify if it wanted to survive in the future.
He invested 35,000 euros in a small fleet of segways and began to introduce land-based activities into his product portfolio. He knew that sooner or later the situation could repeat itself. As it has been.
When it started to rain in April 2008 and the reservoir looked good again in June, many of the political proposals to alleviate future droughts were left in a drawer. “They forgot about the promises, and it is when the reservoirs are full that decisions have to be made,” laments the businessman, who now has in that plan B, in his terrestrial offer, his only lifeline.
“In 2023, kayak outings were anecdotal – just four weeks – and turnover fell 60%, and in 2024 we are heading for a blank year,” he explains. After the boom in nature excursions, coinciding with the pandemic years, in 2022 the business already reduced its turnover. Nothing to do with what was going to happen a year later and what is to come, if it doesn’t rain.
Under other circumstances, in February Marc Álvarez would already be answering calls and answering emails from individuals, schools and centers interested in spending a few days of Easter sailing through the swamp. The most forward-thinking would already be planning the end-of-year excursion, at the gates of summer. “March to November is our strong season,” he says.
In a normal situation, more than 3,000 people, including schoolchildren, enjoy navigation and the explanations of this natural mountain guide from Bigues i Riells. But there is currently no trace of clients interested in aquatic activities on their agenda.
The Aquaterra Club phone hasn’t rung in a while, except for some clueless people who still don’t know that Catalonia is drying up. “But haven’t you seen the news?” Álvarez asks. Accessing the reservoir is dangerous, one must be very careful where one steps, since more than one person has been trapped in the thick mud and the firefighters have had to come to the rescue.
Álvarez explains that in order to navigate, the reservoir should be at 27% of its capacity. “People ask me how long it will take for the swamp to fill. If it rained hard, it wouldn’t be many days. When it opened, it was full within a month,” explains the businessman and guide, who offers another comparison.
“During Storm Gloria, the equivalent of an Olympic swimming pool entered the reservoir every two seconds,” he explains. It’s only been four years. Nobody thought then that one day that resource could be missing.
“At the end of last season I didn’t even believe that this was going to continue like this, in fact I invited many clients who were still wanting to sail to try it this year,” he says about the yacht club’s pier, where there are tied up a few stranded pedal skates.
The Sau reservoir today presents a desolate and ghostly landscape. If it weren’t for the numerous drought tourists who visit it daily – during the week, many retirees – and who want to see with their own eyes the dimension of the tragedy, one might think that it is a science fiction set.
With each passing month, new buildings emerge that were buried under the water with the inauguration of the dam in 1963. Not only does the entire Romanesque church of Sant Romà de Sau now appear, considered a thermometer of the drought in Catalonia and so many times portrayed, and the cemetery, visible for more than a year.
With the water below 2% you can already see the old mill, the barracks in which the workers lived at the end of the 1940s, during the first years of its construction, or the electric poles, half twisted and anchored in the ground, which announce that the bottom is very, very close.
“I’ve never seen it like this, it’s sad,” Álvarez murmurs, with his eyes set on the horizon. A future that he still sees with optimism, as long as politicians do their homework. “We have to think about other long-term resources,” says the businessman, who believes that “depending only on swamp water is not the solution” in the face of climate change that has accelerated in recent years.
It proposes some alternatives such as greater reuse of water resources and an unorthodox measure that several voices are beginning to raise, such as raising the price of the water bill.
“Water is cheap, it is a right, but it cannot be given away,” he says. He also does not believe that the Ebro transfer is a good solution. “In the long run, they may also suffer from this drought,” he argues, and gives as an example to follow leading countries in saving water such as Israel, where they reuse 90% of this resource.
