We Valencians have a complex relationship with fresh water, sometimes complicit, other times not exempt from moments of enormous tension, in a geography where this matter has generated and generates enormous wealth and, also, enormous disasters. In fact, rain does not know how to rain in the Valencian Community, as Raimon sings (“Al my country la pluja no sap ploure”): or it is scarce when it is needed to sustain the correct seasonality of fruits and vegetables (let them tell you to the El Perelló tomato that is now planted in winter), or is capable of causing historical tragedies such as the 1957 floods that devastated the capital, those of 1982 (rupture of the Tous reservoir) that flooded the Ribera Alta region or later torrential episodes or DANA in Valencia, Castellón and Alicante.
It is impossible to dissociate the Valencian social culture without referring to water, the same that for centuries has fed the Valencian garden (the main irrigation ditches created in times of Muslim conquest today give their name to emblematic neighborhoods of the capital, and even to the “Mestalla” stadium). , the one that gives meaning to the last great lake in southern Europe (the Albufera), the one that continues to give life to the very neglected Valencian agriculture, the one that is the base material along with rice for the good flavor of the paellas (so they say experts) or the one that refers to the most popular native drink inside and outside the Valencian Community: Agua de València (delicious combination of orange juice, cava, gin, vodka, ice and sugar).
Eduardo Zaplana’s PP knew how to take advantage of this emotional relationship between Valencians and water to organize mobilizations, under the slogan “Water for all”, in favor of the National Hydrological Plan, PHN, designed by José María Aznar. Year 2003. Two years later, with Francisco Camps as president, disaster occurred: José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero repealed the PHN and with it, the transfer of the Ebro to the Valencian Community due to pressure from the Catalan leftist tripartite (it is important to remember that Jordi Pujol was in favor of transferring water to the Valencians). The PP mobilized the people again and in the streets of Valencia tens of thousands of people confirmed that the hegemony of the popular parties was going to be sustained for many years. Water has been and is a key value in the mobilization of the vote in the Valencian Community.
Compared to other autonomies, which we will not mention, Valencians have been forced in the last 20 years to radically improve the use of water, both in agriculture and human consumption. The works developed in cities such as Valencia, Alicante, Benidorm or Elx for the urban use of treated water are a good example. Million-dollar desalination plants have been built that were demonized at the time by the PP (“they are the nuclear plants of water,” said Esteban González Pons) but that now become part of the solution. It is not enough, because the processes of desertification and drought are increasingly sustained over time, recurrent, intense.
Valencia’s “water solidarity” with Catalonia, rightly supported by Carlos Mazón, reveals the great contradictions in a Spain in which long ago it gave up managing water as a State policy. And how overconfidence, both in Catalonia (where hardly any water works have been carried out to reuse it) or in Castilla-La Mancha (autonomy that imposes, de facto, the flows of the Tagus-Segura), can turn against us. Furthermore, allowing the matter to be the subject of electoral combat in many regions. Valencians, especially those from Alicante, know what I’m talking about, as it has been a spark of unrest against the Government of Pedro Sánchez. See the data from 28-M and 23-J in this province to confirm it.
The “water of València”, in this case without combination with other liquors, will flow towards Barcelona, ??and the good news should serve as a precedent to open a mandatory debate conditioned by climate change. But the Government must understand that this Valencian “solidarity” requires sensitivity in the compensation when the drought punishes parts of this geography. Otherwise, the left will add a new element to wander for many years in the wasteland of the opposition. Another one.
