Crops fail, olive trees dry up, grapevines die out as Spain runs dry

"This is a disaster – we've lost the harvest, 100 percent," Martí Clos tells CGTN, walking through a field of rapeseed plants that should be 20 - 30 centimeters high.

Most haven't even gotten off the ground.

"I'm 68 years old, I've been working these lands all my life and I have never seen a drought like this," Clos continues.

The rapeseed plants should be getting ready to paint these fields with yellow flowers by summer in Pedret I Marza, Girona, but this year that's simply not going to happen.

"We're below 50 percent of the average rainfall over the past 30 years, and our crops can't survive," continues Clos, the provincial president of the Agriculture Association ASAJA.

Three straight years of drought in Catalonia has the industry reeling and the consequences are plain to see.

Spain's water crisis: Rugged grapevines die out

Clos takes CGTN to a vineyard in Colera on the coast near the French border overlooking the Bay of Roses.

A picturesque spot where a glinting sea waits to greet us, but the vineyard is also a graveyard, with dozens of vines dying off over the past year.

Grapevines are one of the toughest plants on earth, with their extremely deep roots making them resilient and resistant to drought. But even these ones couldn't survive such a prolonged absence of water.

Next stop is a field of olive trees, Clos' own personal plantation. He shows us a tree that's shedding its leaves, drying up from the outside in, trying desperately to survive.

"See?" he says, "this tree tried to produce some olives last season but they were small and unusable, now it's losing its leaves, drying up."

Ten meters away the next olive tree looks in fine health, with bright, bushy green leaves. "That's because it didn't produce a single olive last harvest," explains Clos. "This is why the price of olive oil is going up so much."

Different trees, different survival strategies, nature trying to find a way.

Ancient church re-emerges in dried-up reservoir

When Catalonia's Sau Reservoir - just over an hour's drive from Barcelona - dried up it went viral because of an 11th-century church that reappeared from the depths.

It had been completely submerged in water since the 1950s, its bell tower sometimes visible, a favorite for canoers to paddle around. Now you can walk around it, a ghostly warning from the past.

Emergency measures have been put in place by the local Catalan government, hitting farming hard with 80 percent cuts on irrigation and 50 percent on livestock farming, compared to a 25 percent cut for industry.

Furious farmers have been protesting these and other measures for weeks while authorities work out desperate plans to bring in water in giant shipping containers.

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The Spanish government just announced over a half a billion dollars for two brand new desalination plants, but those will take years to build.

This crisis isn't confined to Catalonia either; the Andalusia region in the south of Spain has seen drought conditions for almost eight years now, the longest on record.

The Sierra Boyera reservoir in Cordoba has completely dried up. Once it provided fresh water to some 80,000 people; now people in towns like Belmez have to queue at water trucks and fill plastic bottles for daily consumption.

Then there are the drastic situations in the country's nature reserves like Doñana which are seeing water sucked dry by surrounding strawberry plantations, exacerbating a dire situation where it simply doesn't rain.

So why is all this happening in Spain?

Spain's drought crisis: 'The situation isn't going to get any better'

There are many reasons behind Spain's dwindling water tables. One is greater demand from the human population and industries like tourism and agriculture. But another is the climate.

CGTN spoke to Ruben del Campo, a meteorologist with Spain's state meteorology agency AEMET, for the wider climate context.

"Spain exists between two great geographical areas, the more temperate European region with the northern Atlantic sea above and the great African air mass below which rests over the Saharan desert," he begins.

"So in this constant to-and-fro between the two great air masses, one of the effects of climate change is that the African air mass gains ground."

"So what does that mean? Higher temperatures year-round, particularly in summer with more hours of heat, shorter Spring seasons, and droughts," continues Del Campo.

"In fact, the drought that is now affecting a third of the Iberian peninsula, particularly the south in Andalusia, is already the longest since records began."

"The subtropical climate in Northern Africa is gaining ground and moving north, affecting southern Spain particularly."

Europe is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the world according to climate experts, and southern Europe is now on the front lines of the climate emergency.

'Spain's arid land has doubled since the 1950s'

"We're seeing land the size of the province of Malaga becoming arid every five years," Del Campo goes on.

"From having a more temperate climate to a dry, arid climate with very little rainfall. The amount of dry or arid land in Spain has doubled since the 1950s and that's evidence of how the Northern African subtropical climate is rising in latitude."

So what can be done?

"Adaptation is key. Spain has always suffered droughts, and while that isn't a new phenomenon, there's no doubt that the situation isn't going to get any better as a consequence of anthropogenic [caused by humans] climate change.

"We're going to have to deal with even more intense and longer droughts. We'll have rainy periods too, but we can't rely on those, and we need to expect long dry periods and droughts.

"We have to adapt, and that's clear, in all sectors: Tourism, agriculture, industry, then of course there's the mitigation of climate change.

"Luckily, or maybe unluckily, we know what's producing climate change for the large part - it's a consequence of our emissions resulting in the greenhouse effect, and we need binding global agreements to reduce emissions so we don't pass the 1.5 degree barrier, as hard as that may be.

"Or at very least restrict temperatures from rising as much as we can by the middle or end of the century so that we don't suffer such dramatic effects like these droughts."

"Unfortunately water is a resource that's going to become ever more scarce in the future in this country."

Meanwhile signs in Catalan are everywhere in Barcelona and across the region, part of a local government-paid advertising campaign to get people to value and save this precious resource.

"Water doesn't fall from the sky," they read.

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