High in Spain’s southern mountains, 40 or so men armed with pitchforks and spades cleared piles of stones and grass from an earthquake channel built centuries ago and left the slopes still green.
“It’s a matter of life,” said Antonio Jesus Rodríguez Garcia, a farmer in the nearby village of Pitres, population 400. “Without this water, the farmer cannot grow anything, the village cannot survive.”
The extreme heat sweeping across southern Europe this week is the latest reminder of the challenges climate change poses in Spain, where temperatures reached 109 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, putting half of the region on orange and red weather warnings. Such heat and extended droughts present the threat that three-quarters of the country could be covered by creeping deserts this century.
Faced with that reality, Spanish farmers, volunteers and researchers reached deep into history for solutions, turning to an elaborate network of irrigation canals built by the Moors, a Muslim population that conquered and settled the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.
The canals – called “acequias” from the Arabic “as-saqiya”, meaning water carrier – have made life possible in the driest regions of Europe, supplying the fountains of the magnificent Alhambra Palace and turning the region into Andalusia. Agricultural powerhouse.
Many acequias fell into disuse around the 1960s, when Spain turned to an agricultural model that favored reservoirs and pushed many Spaniards to leave the countryside for the cities. As the use of the network faded, so did the ancient knowledge and traditions that brought water to the far corners of Andalusia.
Now, the complex system is being revived as a low-cost and effective tool to mitigate drought, one acequia at a time.
“Acequias have been able to withstand at least a thousand years of climatic, social and political change,” said archaeologist and historian José Martín Sivantos, who is coordinating a major restoration project. “So why not without it now?”
Mr Sivantos, a stocky man with a goatee, said the Moors built at least 15,000 miles of acequias across the Andalusian provinces of Granada and Almeria. Before acequias, he explained, growing food was difficult in the unstable climate of the Mediterranean, with periodic droughts.
“The genius of the system,” he said, is that it slows the flow of water from the mountains to the plains for better retention and distribution.
Without acequias, snowmelt from mountain peaks flows directly into rivers and lakes, which dry up in the summer. With them, the melt turns into multiple acequias that wind through the hills. The water soaks into the ground in a “sponge effect” and then slowly circulates through aquifers and shows up on slopes, months later, in springs that irrigate crops during the dry season.
Traces of the system are everywhere in the southern Alpujarra Mountains on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Water flows from the mountains at every turn of the road. It softens the soil of the high plains. It springs from fountains in the whitewashed villages typical of the region.
“The Moors left us not only the acequias, but also the landscape they created with them,” said Elena Correa Jiménez, researcher of the ongoing restoration project led by the University of Granada.
She held a shovel and pointed to the green land that stretched out below. “None of this would exist without the aciquias,” he said. “No drinking water, no fountains, no crops. It’s almost a desert.
Water is so essential here that the locals call it a crop. Water is not absorbed by the soil, it is “seeded.” It is not collected for irrigation, it is “harvested”.
While Spain replaced many acequias with more modern water management systems, in the Sierra Nevada alone, according to government data, a fifth of the acequias were abandoned.
The Agricultural Revolution helped make Andalusia the backyard of Europe, sending vast quantities of pomegranates, lemons and barley across the continent. But this led to a thirst for water, which drained the region’s aquifers, exacerbating the drought.
To make matters worse, climate change has exposed Spain to more frequent heat waves. This spring was the hottest on record in Spain, according to Meteorological Agency of the countryApril temperatures in Andalusia exceed 100 degrees.
Canar, a small village nestled in the Alpujarra, has been severely damaged by intensive farming, high temperatures and the abandonment of a nearby aciquia.
Several agricultural plots in the village are now deserted. At the cafe, a sign reads, “I’m looking for an irrigated farm.” And most of the region’s mountain streams now bypass Canar, feeding the river in the valley below that supplies the greenhouses where avocados are grown. No one works in the village.
Farmer Ramon Fernandez Fernandez, 69, said he remembered when village houses would collapse under the weight of winter snow. Asked when it last snowed in the area, he laughed.
“The bad years then are now the good years,” he said of the droughts.
In 2014, the village became a testing ground for Mr Sivantos’ acequia restoration project. For a month, he and 180 volunteers excavated the earth under the scorching sun to reclaim the channel.
“Some farmers who are 80 or older were crying because they thought they would never see the water flowing again,” Mr Sivantos said. He recalled an old resident standing in the ditch when the water started pouring, gesturing with his arms to direct the water towards the village.
Francisco Vilchez Alvarez, a member of a residents’ group that manages irrigation networks in Canar, said restoring the acequia has enabled some residents to grow cherries and kiwis again.
So far, Mr. Sivantos and his team have reclaimed more than 60 miles of irrigation channels, taken researchers, farmers, environmental activists and local groups across the Alpujarras, horticulture tools.
This initiative spread to Spanish territories in the east and north. But Mr Sivantos and several farmers said they still lack financial support because politicians and businesses consider acequias inefficient compared to modern hydraulic networks.
“It’s hard to change mindsets,” he said. “But if you understand efficiency in terms of multifunctionality, conventional irrigation systems are more efficient. They retain water better, recharge aquifers, improve soil fertility.
But the biggest challenge to saving acequias may be preserving the ancient knowledge behind their existence.
In villages like Kanar, where residents use a 19th-century logbook to allocate water to farmers, rural migration has threatened the spread of orally transmitted techniques.
One resident, who knew every branch along the 22 miles of acequias in the area, died recently, taking “precious knowledge, ancestral knowledge” to his grave, Mr. Vilchez said.
Taking a break during the cleanup operation, Pitres Mayor Jose Antonio García, 58, said “a lot of intelligence” had gone into the sewers.
“Now we have an opportunity to use this ancient wisdom to fight climate change,” he said. “Pews, Vamos.”
