Embalsa level

[gruff]

Have seen that the embalsa at Vinuela is down to 25%. Presumably they cannot empty it and at some stage will have to stop using it?

[Wicksey]

It's been low like that for a long time now. I'm sure I've seen it down to 21%. It was full when we first came here 26 years ago but I think it has been going down for years now.

Dwindling water reserves has been a big concern generally for us here. For the past 10 years there's been a constant programme of planting mangoes, and to a lesser degree avocados, on what was previously dry land. There are tens of thousands just in our small valley and as we are on agricultural water, I do worry that stocks will run low in time. We've had little rain here compared to the monsoons we used to get in the 1990s and early 2000s. Not to mention the hundreds of apartments also now being built on the Costa along here that will all use up more precious water.

[olive]

Same with pantano de Iznajar. Only at 23% and there are another 9 weeks till historically the level starts increasing again. Here all the solar driven bore holes that have proliferated for olive irrigation wont help. In the vega near Granada we observed day time massive arable field watering via sprinklers during daytime 40 degree temps.

I believe there is a minimum flow rate out of the pantano to maintain the health of the river and fulfil the obligation to legal water extraction downstream of the dam. Plus the HEP plant is sized on minimum flow.

Desalination ( of seawater) has become a lot more affordable. Maybe in years to come the sea level will go down to combat it rising due to global warming. Either way low reservoir levels are , I think, going to be the norm.

[gavilan]

for the last 20 plus years I have lived next door to an avocado orchard ... and despite the fact that these are mature trees now ... tall trees requiring ladders to reach/pick avocados ... the owners are still using a piped watering system ... so I am assuming all those newly planted trees will continue with their irrigation systems for ever ... or until the water/embalse/rivers around here run completely dry!

[olive]

It would be a brave person or party that tackles water by reducing consumption by farmers or tourism here in Andalucia. The sectors provide a big chunk of gdp. I have posted before here about the proliferation of bore holes. No regulation whatsoever.

Maybe the answer is national pipelines on a big scale. Perhaps use the Free EU money for “green” schemes to do that? Or just continue and hope it magically gets wetter.