Catalonia currently has the driest reservoirs in Spain for the first time since 1999, as its internal basins have a water reserve with 15.4% of their total capacity. Furthermore, Catalan reservoirs have the lowest amount of water since at least 1990, the year in which the historical series of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge on the water reserve stored by reservoirs in Spain begins.
The latest Ecological Transition data indicate that the reserve of Spanish swamps as a whole is at 51.5%, with the highest level of dammed water in the Eastern Cantabrian Sea (83.6%) and the lowest in the internal basins of Catalonia (15.4%).
The drought situation in Catalonia has led the central government and the Generalitat of Catalonia to recently agree on two measures to alleviate the water shortage in the Catalan territory. One of them is the possibility of taking up to 40,000 cubic hectometers of water by boat starting in June from the Sagunto desalination plant (Valencia) to Barcelona to supply the citizens of the Catalan capital and its metropolitan area.
The other measure refers to how the works of two new desalination plants will be financed, one in Tordera, in Blanes (Girona), and the other in the Foix river, between Cunit (Tarragona) and Cubelles (Barcelona).
The historical series on water reserves of Ecological Transition, started in 1990 and analyzed by Servimedia, indicates that the last time Catalonia contributed the lowest percentage of impounded water in Spain dates back to 1999, when it chained 10 weeks (from the end of February to early May) as the area with the driest reservoirs.
Without taking into account the current situation, the last time that the internal basins of Catalonia were the driest in Spain happened at the beginning of May, when they were at 28.3% of their total capacity. Since the middle of last October they have been below 20%, something that had previously only occurred at the beginning of March 1990 (19.7%).
On the contrary, the reservoir of dammed water in the internal basins of Catalonia reached its historical maximum in mid-2013, with 96.8% of its total capacity. And Catalonia contributed the highest percentages of dammed water in Spain on several occasions in several years, the last time in mid-October 2021.
It should be noted that the internal basins of the Catalan territory were the most filled with water in Spain between early February and mid-December 2020, which practically coincided with the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic.
