“Over the course of a month, students and volunteers cleaned the Barjas irrigation channel. “The university provided resources and groups of volunteers and the irrigation community housed them in a local farmhouse and lent them materials,” says Cayetano Álvarez, president of the Cañar irrigation community whose two-hectare garlic and beans farm was one of the many that benefited from the water. To reverse the situation, the University of Granada launched a program for the recovery and cleaning of irrigation channels in 2014 that kicked off in the town of Cañar, in Granada’s Alpujarras mountain region, where a small community of about 200 residents had begun to reactivate the system. Recovery work is carried out on another irrigation channel. The acequias were abandoned from the 1960s onwards as rural Spain became increasingly depopulated and the agri-food industry turned to an intensive model of farming, using irrigation systems incompatible with traditional methods. “We will remove the waste that has been accumulating there, link the separated sections of the channel and allow the water to flow to the University of Granada campus to irrigate its gardens,” says Civantos.īut the Aydanamar watercourse is only a small part of the vast irrigation system that the Arabs built during their seven-century rule of much of the Iberian peninsula. But in the first quarter of 2022 it will once again be operative thanks to a project launched by the University of Granada, and developed by the MEMOLab laboratory, with funding from the Granada Water Foundation and the companies EMASAGRA and Hidralia. The Aydanamar acequia fell into disuse in the 1980s, after more than 1,000 years, when the construction of the road from Granada to Murcia cut across parts of it. The channel climbs for about seven kilometers, crossing the ravine of Víznar, where the poet Federico García Lorca was executed in 1936, to its source at the Fuente Grande de Alfacar. It supplied the artisans who went to the Alhambra to build the Nasrid palaces in the 13th and 14th centuries, and also the Catholic Monarchs’ troops who conquered the Nasrid kingdom in 1492.” “There are documents showing that for a thousand years it provided the Albaicín district of Granada with water, beginning in the 11th century.
“This is the Aynadamar acequia ,” he explains.
Overlooking the city of Granada, in the upper reaches of Monte del Sombrero, the medieval historian and archeologist José María Civantos points out a ditch about five meters wide and two meters deep, filled with weeds and garbage. Workers fixing up an old water channel from the days of the Nasrid dynasty in Granada.
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