Catalonia: Time of the signs
A dream destination for travellers across the globe, Barcelona and the wider Catalonia region are greeting visitors with a different list of buckets.
It’s not the kind of sign you expect - or want - to be greeted with upon landing.
Airport baggage claim areas and metro stops in Barcelona are prime advertising real estate, generally reserved for luring visitors into leaving more euros in the debit side of the local economy ledger: a rented car to explore the golden tones of the Catalan coast, a synchronized splash in an aquatic park, a tour of a football stadium where the best players in the world no longer play.
Most of the time, however, we’re too busy trying to detect signs of life from the baggage carousel or overhead screen to pay much attention to the same type of experience ads we’ve seen a thousand times elsewhere.
A big red bucket beneath “DROUGHT ALERT” in bold red letters, on the other hand - now that’s unignorable.
Bone dry
“A practically bone-dry Catalonia,” wrote El País on February 1st, “has pressed the emergency red button for almost 80% of its population after 40 months of the worst drought the region has suffered on record.” With water reserves falling below 16%, “The climate crisis is putting us to the test like the pandemic,” said regional president Pere Aragonès.
This was the Catalan government declaring a state of emergency for drought in winter - not the height of summer. Surely there’s worse to come. With summers in this hot country arriving earlier and leaving later, the Spanish saying “Hasta el cuarenta de mayo no te quites el sayo” (Don’t store away your coat until May 40th, i.e. June 9th) is now obsolete.
“The situation in Barcelona would be far worse,” wrote Stephen Burgen in The Guardian, “were it not home to Europe’s largest desalination plant, built after the last serious drought in 2008, which supplies the city with 33% of its drinking water. A further 25% comes from recycled wastewater.”
Not all parts of Catalonia are as fortunate.
The following video shows drone footage of the Sau Reservoir at just 4.7% of its capacity. 90km north of Barcelona, La Vanguardia has called it “the epicentre of the drought in Catalonia.” Within weeks, the drought had drained it to 1% of its capacity.
Never one to miss an opportunity to rile up rivals, the conservative president of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, suggested that Catalonia’s drought situation was linked to the closure of bullrings in the region.
But with regional elections (May 12th) and peak tourist season on the horizon, Catalans have little time or incentive to get bogged down in high-calorie, low-nutrition culture wars with Madrileños.
A thirst for tourism
The tension between vecinos and visitors in Barcelona is nothing new. An increasingly parched part of Spain is becoming increasingly saturated by travellers looking for sun, sea, and sangria. The drought has further raised the stakes.
While the area around Almería down in Andalusia formed the backdrop of many of Hollywood’s great Western films of the 1960s, Catalonia’s dusty plains and expanses of cracked earth make it an adequate setting for a fierce modern-day face-off. Here, the party most likely to get their way - and water - will be those with a fistful of dollars.
Daily water usage per person is limited. Gym and beachside showers are out of action, and public fountains are silent and dry. The Catalan government has ordered farmers, who consume an estimated 30% of the region’s total water reserves, to use 80% less for irrigation and 50% less for livestock. Current water restrictions for locals are being offset by pristine golf courses (there are seven within a 50km radius of Barcelona), swimming pools, and the excess everything of luxury hotels.
“It doesn’t seem logical,” said Julia Martínez of the New Water Culture Foundation in an interview with El País, “to have a scenario where there are restrictions for the local population, but tourists can come and use unlimited amounts of water.”
Many experts saw the Covid-19 pandemic as a potential watershed moment for Spain’s tourist industry, the perfect time to transition towards a quality-over-quantity model.
Then 2023 happened.
The 85 million international visitors was the highest on record. Accounting for approximately 12% of the national GDP, tourism in Spain is a sector with a powerful lobby. Having to meet the basic sanitary needs of tax-paying citizens while ensuring that the wrong visitor with a strong social media following isn’t affected, the authorities face an unenviable balancing act.
There’s a fine line between raising necessary awareness and raising an alarm that could send tourists and their wallets elsewhere. It’s all right telling a Girona local that “water doesn’t fall from the sky,” but try telling that to someone from Galway or Glasgow. For short-term visitors, extreme spells of dry weather along the Mediterranean coast are extremely appealing. The signs in Catalan appealing for responsible water consumption are somebody else’s problem.
For decades in Spain, package holiday tourism has been a banker for a quick buck. With more aggressive and frequent heatwaves and life-threatening temperatures, however, that model looks primed to quickly burn out.
“Once you’ve attempted a beach holiday in 40C heat, or watched other people attempt one, you won’t try another,” wrote Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. “If Spain were a company, the consultants would say: ‘Your business model no longer works. Either pivot or close the thing down.’”
Roasting resorts where water supplies are short will still win the get-rich-quick sprints in the short term, but the cooler climes of Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, and the Basque Country look well placed to win the marathon.
Every drought has a silver lining
“Last week I went to a church that should be underwater,” wrote The Guardian journalist Ajit Niranjan on X (Twitter).
Once a pillar of daily life in Sant Romà de Sau, a small town that was flooded to become part of the Sau reservoir, today the oldest standing submerged church in the world is no longer submerged.
A sign of the times, each weekend thousands of drought tourists flood the site of this climate catastrophe. Getting too close for comfort to get the best selfie angle, several visitors have had to be pulled out of the wet cement-like mud by passersby. On one occasion, La Vanguardia reported, the local fire brigade had to be called.
These ridiculous situations feel like an appropriate metaphor for the climate emergency that is already here: we are aware of the dangers but, to quote the viral video of Barry from Eastenders, we’re gonna do it anyway.
Drier lands and more intense heat will increase the frequency and ferocity of wildfires - will copious amounts of precious water continue to be dedicated to keeping the back nine greens pristine for a wealthy yet tiny cohort?
Each summer, as the weather maps on the evening news throb in darker tones of red, I wonder whether Spain’s thirst for tourism is actually an appetite for destruction.
At least anyone in Catalonia this spring/summer who sees the red buckets won’t be able to say that they never saw the signs.
I'll admit I have not been staying up to date on the drought conditions here, this was super informative, thank you!