No sooner are you off the plane at Alicante's sunblasted airport but the billboards leap out with enticing advertisements of palm-treed, seaside villas, swimming pools and emerald green golf courses.
ALICANTE, Spain — No sooner are you off the plane at Alicante's sunblasted airport but the billboards leap out with enticing advertisements of palm-treed, seaside villas, swimming pools and emerald green golf courses.
But a half-hour hike inland and the scorched earth, near-dry reservoirs and stunted crops tell a different tale.
Although the millions of tourists visiting Spain's "costas" this summer may not realize it, much of the nation is parched and there's no oasis in sight. The driest winter and spring for more than 60 years have left reservoirs in some regions with 20 percent their normal capacity and crops across this European agricultural powerhouse nation wilting. Rivers have lost nearly a third of their volume.
"Right now we're at a critical point," said Juan Manuel Pascual Torres, 40, a melon and pepper farmer from the southeastern town of Elche. "If we don't get substantial rainfall soon we're in real trouble."
Farmers in his region have been told they can irrigate for a maximum of eight minutes a day. Torres doesn't rule out abandoning his crops to seek work in a shoe factory as he did during the 1990s when another prolonged drought hit Spain.
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Losses nationally so far are estimated at some euro1.6 billion (US$ 1.95 billion) in failed crops and fodder for grazing animals. The Agricultural Ministry predicts grain production to be slashed 25 percent nationally this year with some southern and eastern regions suffering shortfalls of up to 50 percent.
Orange groves and vineyards, still reeling from last winter's frosts, promise a meager harvest in the fall.
"If it doesn't rain soon, I'm going to be some euro30,000 (US$38,000) in the red and I don't know how I'm going to handle that," said Joaquin Bretons, a 41-year-old father of two, gazing helplessly across his stunted chickpea and barley fields outside the southeastern town of Caudete. Stalks that should be standing a meter tall barely reach above their furrows.
A bitter argument is raging over how the drought should be handled.
One side, led by the conservative opposition Popular Party, calls for revival of a multibillion euro (dollar) transfer program that called for the water-richer northern areas to supply the center and south.
The governing Socialists, backed by most other parties and ecological groups, scrapped that plan as soon as they got into government last spring. They insist on a total rethink of water resources, based on desalination plants and water banks, with an emphasis on less squandering and more protection of aquifers and forests.
"We have to change our idea of water because there isn't enough water for everything," said Jaime Pallop, the Environment Ministry's Water Department Director.
Less than a decade ago Spain was in the throes of a five-year drought that hit harvests, forced restrictions in towns, and triggered a bitter interregional and cross-party conflict over water rights.
Ten years on, little seems to have changed except the party in government.
"We know droughts are cyclical. We should be used to this," said Torres. "But we never seem to learn."
Spain's Iberian neighbor Portugal is in a similar predicament. Almost 70 percent of the country is in severe or extreme drought conditions, the Meteorological Institute says.
The drought is especially acute in the southern provinces of Alentejo, a farming region, and Algarve, a coastal vacation area whose population of about 400,000 more than doubles in the summer due to foreign tourists.
In those regions, rainfall since October is at its lowest since 1901. In Faro, the Algarve's largest city, just 141 mm (5.55 inches) of rain has fallen in eight months -- 28 percent of the average. Farmers in the Alentejo estimate losses at more than euro1 billion. Grain harvests are 70 percent down on last year.
Madrid's Socialist government maintains that reserves guarantee there will be no domestic consumption restrictions this summer. But several regions have had to take measures, such as shutting off showers on beaches and reducing water pressure to houses.
Many farmers are urging the government to return to the water transfer program.
"The problem is not the water but the politicians and their plans," said citrus farmer Juan Manuel Selma. "Transfers worked for the Romans and there wasn't much they didn't know," he said, referring to the ancient aqueducts that still carry water across parts of Spain today.
But statistics indicate the government has a point about the need to reform water policy.
Spain loses more than 60 percent of its water before it reaches the tap and only 1.5 percent is recycled. The country is tops in Europe for using up to 80 percent of its water in irrigation systems, of which only a fifth could be considered modern.
Source: Associated Press
