Driving up the mountain, towards Andorra, I look away when I pass the Baells reservoir, beyond Cercs.
The scene makes me cringe and I want to see more, but I’d better stop acting like an idiot while driving and pull over.
So, I stop.
I stop the car at a viewpoint and, in the end, like a madman I contemplate the scene.
The view confirms everything that the experts tell us on television.
The reservoir is at 26% of its capacity.
The reservoir is a large puddle and, where there used to be water, there is now a mud of cracked earth crowned by a building: the abbey of Sant Salvador de la Vedella rises proudly where it once drowned.
And I don’t see rowers or sailboats or water skiers, and I wonder if there will be pike, catfish and trout left in these waters, since they barely have a place to swim, it’s a big puddle.
(…)
The image of the water skier comes to mind because I am heading to Grandvalira. I will be covering the Alpine Skiing World Cup finals, which started yesterday.
The issue of skiing is a blessing for Andorra, which takes the issue as a personal thing, just as it takes all these issues. I myself had been able to check it four years ago, in other World Cup finals in Soldeu and El Tarter, in 2019, when Marcel Hirscher, the best skier of the moment, had said:
– This site is prepared to offer the best conditions.
This phrase had been magnificent, a push for Andorrans in the uncertainty of skiing, given that even then the wisest told us:
– The days of the great drought will soon arrive.
Even?
Contemplating the reservoir in 2019, the skeptic gave way to his skepticism.
Who is talking about drought?
The Baells reservoir was splendid!
From a bird’s eye view, the observer could barely distinguish the peak of the abbey. The sailboats sailed happily. The catfish drifted in double corriola. Everything was formidable in the place, it was a reservoir as God commands, a reservoir at 98% of its capacity.
Well: these are the days of the great Mikaela Shiffrin (the greatest skier ever), but also the days of the great drought, and now I’ve stopped at a lookout overlooking Baells Abbey, and here planted I wonder where we are going, since in a few days the spring will spread and the snows from the mountains will descend and rest in the reservoirs, and then these same waters will be lost in the night of time, like the C rays that shine in the darkness, near the Tannhäuser gate.
