Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 70 years. The lack of rain and the record temperatures in April – last week almost the whole country fluctuated between 30 and 40°C – are drying up the water basins in some cases to less than 25% of their capacity and threatening the water supply of the population.
A quarter of the country is on alert and the weather forecasts give little hope: it will not rain on large parts of the Iberian Peninsula until mid-May and it will probably hardly rain at all and sporadically in the following months. So much so that the authorities of Catalonia, which has had no rain for 32 months, are announcing that the Barcelona region, which has a population of over six million, could go into an “emergency” by September if forecasts are true.
Agriculture was particularly badly affected in the southern regions. And the drought will immediately become a political issue with administrative and regional elections on May 28 and parliamentary elections in December. The attacks by the regional president of the People’s Party and Council in Andalusia on the socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez were particularly violent. “We have a brutal water problem,” Juanma Moreno warned last Sunday, emphasizing: “Without water there is no agriculture, no breeding; without water there are no jobs in many regions and municipalities of Andalusia» and «without water many inland towns will die». That’s why he called on Sanchez to “take the problem seriously”.
For his part, the Prime Minister and leader of the PSOE acknowledged in Parliament last week that “the drought will be one of the issues that will focus the political and territorial debate in our country in the coming years”.
Territorial tensions are particularly evident in Andalusia, a region that has long been a feud of the PSOE, particularly during the years in government of Andalusian Felipe Gonzalez (1982-1996), but which gave the party an outright majority in last year’s elections and where the presence of the far-right Vox party is also strong.
The cultivation of rice is particularly at risk – 60% in the province of Seville – but also tomatoes and fruit. The “Toro Bravo” or fighting bull, the symbol of Spain, is also threatened with extinction due to the drought. “At this rate we will disappear,” denounce the farmers of the big “Ganaderien”. According to the president of the Asociación de Ganaderías de Lidia, costs have doubled due to the increase in food and energy prices due to the war in Ukraine and the lack of water. “It’s terrible, the animals have already eaten what little grass there is in the field and we are forced to buy fodder and fodder to feed the cattle,” María Jesús Gualda told EFE news agency.
Why doesn’t it rain in Spain? The reason is the stagnation of an anticyclonic ridge on the Iberian Peninsula, which diverts storms. In the short term, according to weather forecasts from Aemet (the state meteorological agency), the situation will not change: in the next few days only the northern provinces will receive the long-awaited, but still “scarce” rainfall.