Posted
Video length: 3 mins.
In Spain, old irrigation canals are being brought back into service to irrigate crops. Report in the Sierra Nevada.
In Andalusia (Spain), an ancestral heritage is hidden on the heights of the mountains of the Sierra Nevada: hundreds of kilometers of canals, which wind through the valleys. Built more than 1,000 years ago, they are dug into the ground. In Jérez Del Marquesado, at an altitude of 1,200 m, a network of 90 km of canals captures water from the mountains to supply fields and villages. Antonio Lopez Perez, the president of the community of irritants of Jérez Del Marquesado, is responsible for the proper distribution of water among 1,000 plots of land.
A virtuous system
If the method is ancestral, it is also a system of the future. “The advantage is that some of this water infiltrates into the ground. As it infiltrates, it also recharges groundwater”explains José Maria Martin Civantos, research archaeologist at the University of Granada (Spain).
Many canals had been abandoned in the 1960s. The researcher and his team therefore regularly invite local residents to come and restore and maintain them. These volunteers are all concerned with preserving their habitat. “It’s important, because without these canals it would be a desert here”, says one of them. The system also preserves biodiversity and would be adapted to future upheavals caused by global warming.