It was created by the Arabs 1000 years ago

A Spanish university is leading efforts to restore aqueducts that were used in the days of Andalusia

• Spaniards re-drill the aqueducts established by the Arabs.

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The University of Granada in Spain is seeking to establish a project to revive thousands of kilometers of irrigation canals that were dug during the Islamic era, and which were neglected in the 20th century.

This project aims to reuse it to help rural communities and support sustainable agriculture.

Medieval historian and archaeologist Jose Maria Civantos notes that “these irrigation canals supplied water to the Albaicín neighborhood of Granada 1,000 years ago, starting in the 11th century, as documents indicate, and also supplied water to the craftsmen who built the Alhambra and the Nasrid dynasty palaces in the 13th and 14th centuries.” , as well as the forces of the Catholic Kings who occupied the Nasrid kingdom in 1492.

The Albajarras Canal climbs about seven kilometers, crosses the Faznar Valley, to its source in the town of Grande de El Fakhar.

"We will remove the waste that has accumulated there, connect the separate sections of the canal and allow water to flow into the campus of the University of Granada to irrigate its gardens," Civantos says.

But the canal's waterway is only a small part of the vast irrigation system built by the Arabs during their eight-century rule over most of the Iberian Peninsula. This canal was neglected from the 1960s onwards as rural Spain became increasingly depopulated and the agri-food industry shifted to an intensive model of agriculture, using irrigation systems incompatible with traditional methods.

On this basis, the University of Granada launched a program to restore and clean irrigation canals in 2014, which was launched in the town of Canar, in the Albajarras Mountains region of Granada, where a small community of about 200 residents began to revitalize the system. “The university provided resources and groups of volunteers and gave the residents the necessary materials,” says Caetano Alvarez, head of the Canar Irrigation Society, whose garlic and bean farm has benefited from the canal. "For a month, students and volunteers cleaned the Bagaras irrigation canal, and when water started flowing along it for the first time in 30 years, we had a party," he adds.

The irrigation canal not only supplied the local people with water, but also strengthened the social bonds as its maintenance requires the cooperation of the whole community to remove the papers entering the canal, otherwise they keep their area clean and share the water rights, not only in Kanas but with other cities like Orgiva, which You also benefit from it. In 2015, a year after its implementation, the Parajas Irrigation Canal received a recognition of good practices from the Hispania Nostra Environmental Association.

“Since then, we have collaborated to restore 14 abandoned irrigation canals and have participated in the annual cleaning of at least 30 more canals,” says Sivantos, promoting traditional agricultural methods along with the latest technology, as well as using social media to organize volunteers. It means working on more than 80 kilometers of akyakias and involving about 1,500 people,” he says.

Despite the efforts made so far, the biggest challenge is reclaiming about 3,000 kilometers of irrigation canals in the Sierra Nevada alone, although Civantos believes that in the provinces of Granada and Almeria there are about 24,000 canals.

“But it is not only about volunteerism and resources, it is also about social recognition of rural areas, agricultural activity and local knowledge, all of which are rich in landscapes of cultural and ecological value and the vast resources necessary to secure our future,” Sivantos adds.

economic revolution

In 711 AD, after a dazzling military campaign that ended with the destruction of the Visigothic kingdom and the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, Muslims replaced their swords and spears with pickaxes and shovels and began digging irrigation canals, taking advantage of slopes on the ground and using sticks and stones to build dams along rivers, as they saw their ancestors do in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula.

"Irrigation and water management were essential to the economic development of Andalusia, and these efforts reflect the splendor of the Umayyad dynasty and the Caliphate of Cordoba," says Sivantos.

• The canal waterway is only a small part of the vast irrigation system, which was built by the Arabs during their rule, which lasted for eight centuries.

The Muslims replaced their swords and spears with pickaxes and shovels and began digging irrigation canals.

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