The Ministry of Agriculture has hired the private company, Prointect to draw up a viability project to bring irrigation water down from Béznar-Rules Reservoirs to the coast.

The project, costing 282,000 euros, has an execution period of ten months. Once the basic environmental viability has been certified, the actual construction project will be drawn up with a budget of four million euros.

OK, that’s the official bit but let’s look at some facts. The Embalse de Rules, which is situated in the municipality of Vélez Benaudalla was designed to provide water, both irrigation and domestic for a coastal population of 100,000 and 5,000 hectares of irrigated land.

The dam construction, designed to hold back 114 cubic hectometres, was finally finished in 2004 after having been started back in the late 1980’s. However, when the first tonnes of cement were being poured, somebody realised that it was sitting on a geological fault line, so work stopped and the whole thing moved a little further down river.

So, yes, the dam was completed in 2004, yet the water has basically sat there and sulked since then. When they first began to fill it up, they had to stop because nobody had thought of drawing up a emergency or contingency plan.

After a year of waiting for that, filling recommenced only to halt again because the autovia bridge was causing problems and had to have one of its pillars and the northern end of the bridge rebuilt – we’re now talking about 2014 – before the reservoir was finally filled to the brim.

But it doesn’t end there because now with a full reservoir, there was still no way of piping the water to anywhere – a dam full of water and no way of moving the water other than opening up the sluice gates and letting it run down the river. It is, in effect, the largest swimming pool in Europe with a price tag of 288m euros…

So, what we are finally seeing, at the doors of summer 2016, are moves to have a viability project drawn up for the installation of a piping system to bring the stored water down to the coastal towns. Once that is approved, then the actual construction project will be drawn up and commenced.

Now, a complete distribution system from Rules to the coast will cost… 319.4m euros, so the total cost of Rules is around 500m euros – peanuts!

But don’t get us started on the question of silt/sand! Needless to say around 3 million tonnes of silt and sand no longer make it down to the coast each year to regenerate (naturally and free of charge) the beaches. In case you are wondering, it would take 85,000 20t-lorries to transport that amount! What’s more, if it’s not going down the river, where is it going? Yup, its slowly filling up the reservoir basin.

With a bit of luck, we will have the distribution network in place before the reservoir completely fills up with silt.

(News: Velez de Benaudalla, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)