The Central Government has approved more than 193m euros to cover 100% of the repair & prevention works for damages caused by winter storms in 73 municipalities in Granada.

Perhaps they should rename Salobreña Soggybreña because when it rains any serious amount, you need a canoe to get around the Pontanilla area.

Well, thanks to an impressive amount of dosh thrown at it from the Central Government, the Salobreña Town Council is going to sort it all out so that any shop selling wellies in the near future will crash and burn.

The said money, will come through the Real Decreto-ley 5/2026, brought into being to approve funding for the making good flood damage across the country. Soggybreña is going to get just over 5.4m euros within a larger package totalling 6.1m euros.

Now, for decades Salobreña (away with the name calling!) has been tackling a defective sewage system and the rain water coming down the ramblas and barrancos into the urban area of the municipality, with what can only be described as, ‘not-a-sausage-of-success,’as this winter showed.

In 2019 a study that had been commissioned came up with three ways to sort out the issue, but the problem was that there were no funds to carry any of them out.

The study took into account that Salobreña sits at the mouth of a delta made by Río Guadalfeo where water is funnelled in by nearby hillsides, such as the one where Monte de Los Almendros sits, and of course, the rock on which the old town is, as well. 

Going back to the time of the Romans, and what today is the vega, was once a bay that silted up. The castle on the rock guarded these inlets with its cannons mounted on the Castle… 

But today, we have the vega with the watertable barely under the surface, so if you dig a hole you’ve got a swimming pool for little expense… if you don’t mind sharing it with toads, snakes and tourists who fall in by mistake.

The N-340 doesn’t precisely help either as it is raised above the vega and acts as a barrier, causing the water to accumulate at two points: The main-junction entrance  (Pontanilla) and the one in front of the municipal stadium.

So, even the Municipal Surveyor considers that you can’t build a drainage system to cope with that sort of build-up.

And then there are the old irrigation ditches that used to drain the area where housing now sits; the new town. The housing has its rain-drain system but it also has to handle the water coming down the old irrigation channels, once its swished around the vega.

Taking all this into account, the Town Hall has come up with a cunning plan to intercept the water coming into these points before it actually reaches the urban area and divert it off to the river!

To achieve this they will build a large collecting point to the north of the urban area where the trading estate is, go under the N-340 where the bridge is in front of the stadium, then along the Cuesta del Comediante and the Pago de Sotillos and then empty into the river. 

(News: Salobrena, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)

Keywords: Storm Damage Aid Allocated, Flooding, Pontanilla, Junta, Central Government, Farms, Evacuated Homes, Businesses, Winter Storms

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