Between two waters
Cos d’Ebre, Caspe - Mequinenza stretch with Marco Noris. 21 - 22 June 2025
In the mid-afternoon I take the car to drive to Caspe, after a Friday full of meetings, hyperactive like every day. It is very hot. I move away from Barcelona and the horizon widens; I enter a slightly emptier space. My thoughts spread further and further apart, just like the cars. I simply move forward. I follow the last stretch of the Segre and cross the Ebro at Mequinenza. I am near the campsite where I will meet Marco. Months ago I had set aside this weekend to accompany him on his walk. By car I cover much of the stretch we will later do on foot, in the opposite direction, by a much longer and more winding road. For me, following the Ebro is an old dream, and the stretch of river that begins here and ends at the mouth is, in some way, my home.
We are in the middle of an extreme heatwave and the next day we get up early to avoid the high temperatures as much as possible. But we take a while to set off. Marco is a rather slow person, who brings awareness to the things he does and does them with care. As if he wanted to prolong contact with the present, the touch of everything he touches. Each thing is perfectly packed and has its place in the rucksack, the sole container of his belongings for several weeks. As I watch him I think that, in our society, which feeds on blind future expectations, slowness is perhaps the most subversive attitude. The desire to remain in the present somehow casts doubt on the need for this ever more splendid future. I think this has a lot to do with walking.
We follow the GR-99, almost always at the edge of the Ebro. There is something profoundly fitting in the act of going on foot beside a river, accompanying it on its slow descent towards the sea. The speed of the water and that of the walker are similar. We move, then, with the river, and that is why here, at the tail of the great Mequinenza reservoir, where the water hardly moves, there is no need to hurry. The river, even more than the walker, ‘makes its path by walking’. And here it traces wide meanders. This means that some elements of the landscape accompany us for much of the journey. The earthy ruins of the Magdalena hermitage, which seem to have emerged from the very crag on which they stand, draw near and move away alternately, but never stop watching us. In former times, this hermitage was the object of pilgrimages to ask for rain in periods of drought. The rise in the water level following the construction of the reservoir has now placed the hermitage on an island, accessible on foot only when the water is low. And indeed, who would want to make a pilgrimage to ask for rain when the reservoir level evidences the abundance of water? Nature is wise, and whoever is not content is exactly because they do not want to be.
The water is always close, often in sight, but somehow it remains inaccessible. There is a certain irony in this, in the enormous flow of water that runs through this dry and harsh land. One need only look at our luggage: the most important part is the more than 18 litres of water we carry for the two days of walking. And it may not be enough for us! Evidently, we are not the only ones who are thirsty. On this stretch, the vegetation surrounding the Ebro bears witness to the dryness of the environment and, beyond the willows and tamarisks of the bank, is dominated by sparse maquis. I think of a description of our itinerary that would cite each and every one of the shrubs lining the path: mastic - flax - rosemary - maple - holm oak - rosemary - … A long thread of names that would put botanical contiguity before metric reality, and that here would tend to minimise distances, since the density of plants is low. Paradoxically, there is not enough water. «Lo riu és vida», no doubt, but not always where it passes, or not as much as we would like.
Although the river brings a certain humidity to the ecosystems around it, most of the water passes by, just as we do. Rivers return to the sea the excess rain that falls on the continents, but in their course only the water that remains once the needs (the transpiration) of the surrounding vegetation are satisfied actually arrives. In the upper stretch of the Ebro, from Cantabria to the Basque Country, precipitation in the form of rain and snow far exceeds the water consumed by the forests, despite their lushness; and the rest, abundant, nourishes the river. Here, in the middle-lower stretch, almost all the water that falls is used by the plants, however meagre the vegetation may be. Meagre but at the same time rich: stressful environments are often associated with a high diversity of plants with extraordinary adaptations. The area where we find ourselves is no exception. As in many dry regions of the planet, the difficulties associated with the lack of water are aggravated by the type of soil, rich in gypsum. These soils tend to form crusts with little porosity, which limit both water infiltration and the plants’ capacity to take root. This means we find a very particular flora, with species exclusive to this type of substrate. Some have found fascinating solutions to the difficulties imposed by the environment. A few years ago it was discovered (in the Monegros, near where we are) that some plants are able to extract directly the water found in the crystalline structures of mineral gypsum, and this allows them to survive the summer drought.
The Mequinenza reservoir is the largest on the Ebro, one more fruit of the caudillo’s obsession with combating the «pertinaz sequía» (persistent drought) with hydraulic infrastructures. It is used above all to produce energy, but also to channel irrigation water, which is nothing other than a way of forcing the river to release water, to be more generous with the ecosystems it crosses. Initially vegetable gardens were irrigated, but increasingly large olive plantations are watered too. Enormous fields with perfectly parallel green rows that stand out against the pale, almost white background of the soil. The dryness is becoming excessive even for dry-farming crops. Also for us, who spend (survive) the long midday hours of Saturday under the shade of a pine on the riverbank. We bathe several times, doing honour to the reservoir’s other name (the sea of Aragon). I wonder whether you can bathe twice in the same reservoir. It is a subject Heraclitus did not address, surely with good judgement.
But what we do, above all, is walk. The cadence of our steps and the active yet calm disposition put us in an attitude inclined to look, listen and think; also to talk. We talk about Cos d’Ebre, a project in which the artist puts his own body into play in order to know the «body» of the river. About the extent to which a proposal that involves walking more than one thousand two hundred kilometres over almost three months is going against the current, even though our immediate experience contradicts it. We live so accelerated that we sometimes forget the obvious fact that walking is, fundamentally, a way of moving about. Perhaps it is a relatively slow way of moving through space, by current standards. But, on the other hand, I think that going on foot favours travel in time; in the trivial sense that it is a way of returning to certain habits of the past, but also because slowness in movement leaves more room for the wandering of thoughts, for the games of the imagination.
Immersed in conversation, we decide to extend the journey well into the night, partly because at dusk the temperature is more pleasant and partly because I think we both want to sleep with the calm of knowing that the next day’s stretch will be shorter. We reach the refuge of the Freixes (ash trees) valley quite late and very tired. We see no ash trees, and the «refuge» is a rather minimalist hut, but more than enough to spend the night. We sleep lightly, as one sleeps in the mountains, and we resume the march early in the morning, under a sun perhaps a little less inclement than the day before. In mid-morning we come across a large flock of sheep and goats with Miguel, their shepherd, who tells us that he too likes to walk and shows us photos of his last ascent of the Moncayo dressed in the same blue overalls he is wearing now. He always wears them when he goes hiking. Like a good Samaritan, he gives us water. He also tells us about his flock, which has been shrinking (it had once numbered more than a thousand sheep) and which no one will continue when he retires. The same story repeated again and again. The passage of time, progress, inexorable change. When Josep Maria Espinàs went down the Ebro one summer almost 65 years ago (curiously not on foot, walker that he was, but «on a primitive Velosolex») the great reservoirs of the Ebro did not yet exist, but the works had already begun.
The acceleration of progress, or of a certain kind of progress, had to halt the river’s current. The Mequinenza and Riba-Roja reservoirs radically changed the landscape where we find ourselves and the lives of the inhabitants for many kilometres around. They allow water to be stored and used here and where it is convenient, and at the same time to generate the energy needed to nourish yet more progress, more change, less flow, fewer sediments, less river. The Ebro river basin currently has 187 reservoirs that retain more than 90% of the sediments carried by the water, especially the sands. The Ebro delta keeps retreating. If the current trends of sediment shortage and rising sea level continue, most of the Delta will disappear before the end of the century, along with the people who live in it and an extraordinary fauna and flora. Hence the «Salvem lo Delta» campaign of the Plataforma en Defensa de l’Ebre, which has spent 25 years fighting for the present and for the future of the river and its people.
The second day’s journey proves less hard. We reach the impressive Mequinenza dam intake in mid-afternoon. The reservoir is almost full and enormous jets of water gush out. Far below us a few gulls fly over the riverbed. Here the Mequinenza reservoir ends and, immediately, that of Riba-Roja begins. A few kilometres on, at the confluence where the waters of the Segre meet those of the Ebro, lies the town of Mequinenza. A new, functional settlement, now devoted to the recreational fishing industry. Of the old town of Mequinenza, which grew rich on the lignite of the mines, very little remains. It was demolished during the construction of the reservoir, in the mid-sixties, and only the layout of the streets and the school building remain. Ironically above the water level, which never came to cover the houses. Now it is all a Parc de la Memòria (a shaken one) to pay homage to the people who had to leave their home, to keep alive in our memory the characters and stories that Jesús Moncada told us in his books.
We have spent two days walking to make a journey we could have done by car in little more than 20 minutes. Had we done it that way, we would not have seen the same things nor lived them in the same way. Contiguity and contact provide a context that speed does not replace. In some way we have rubbed up against the reality hidden behind the maps. We have touched and let ourselves be touched by the river. We have even drunk from its waters (after purifying them with reasonable precaution, that is). And we have sweated profusely. As I move away from Mequinenza to return home, now by car, the sunset sky is storm-red. It rains. I think that perhaps our sweat, water that until recently was part of us, now forms part of this rain, and that it will travel with the Ebro (and with Marco), unhurried, until it pours into the sea.
Jordi Martínez Vilalta (1975, Barcelona) is a professor of ecology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a researcher at CREAF. His research seeks to better understand the functioning of forest systems and their response to environmental changes, especially those related to reduced water availability (drought, high temperatures). To this end he combines different approaches (observational, experimental and modelling) in different biomes (Mediterranean, temperate, tropical). In recent years he has developed a growing interest in collaborations between science and art in the field of ecology and the environmental sciences, and has collaborated on several artistic projects.
Text written for the catalogue of the exhibition «Cos d’Ebre», produced by Lo Pati, Centre d’Art Terres de l’Ebre.
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