Erasmus: A Visit to the Abaran Waterwheels and new Ways in Water Management

Posts über unser Erasmus-Projekt erscheinen in Englischer Sprache – Übersetzung? | Posts about our Erasmus project appear in English – Translation?

The region of Murcia has for hundreds of years been an arid one. Some say that in ancient times this was a lush, forested place but that in Bronze Age man felled the trees to make way for his own choice of vegetation. This led to a decrease in rainfall. So the people had to find a way to make out a living in a severely desiccated landscape.

In Abarán and on both banks of the Segura River you find a set of traditional norias or waterwheels, still used today to irrigate orchards and groves of fruit trees.
We walked on a pedestrian route along a canal linking the waterwheels and could see how the precious water was led from one garden to the next. We visited La Noria Grande located near the centre of Abaran which is reputed to be Europe’s largest functioning waterwheel.

The Arabs were not the inventors of the waterwheel, but they put them to greater use than any other group. A waterwheel is an efficient machine that, exploiting hydraulic energy, a renewable resource, raises water from an irrigation canal to a higher one, thereby increasing the area of irrigable land. Having travelled all around the allotments the canal runs back down to the river, and any unwanted or un-needed water is returned to the source. Not a drop is wasted.

Nowadays water management is one big sustainability challenge in Murcia. Alternative water sources are exploited such as salt water and reused water, especially for agricultural irrigation. The new conception of the city as a living, sustainable organism that manages resources from the point of view of self-sufficiency implies that the sewerage network not only fullfills its historical function of transporting the water to treatment plants, but also leads other alternative sources of water into the system, such as reclaimed water, with the aim of being reused. In the municipality of Murcia 11 % of the treated water is reused for agricultural, environmental and recreational purposes. The remaining 89 % is returned to the Segura River as an ecological flow.

After our away visits, an online-talk about the role of women in Africa awaited us.

 

All posts about the Erasmus project can be found here.

 

 

 

 

erstellt am: 25.11.2024 von Julia Kabatas

« – »