"I've seen all the water that comes from the Segre frozen. If I threw a stone on the ice, it didn't even flinch. Even some buckets of water we had inside our house froze! I've seen large logs come down on stormy days. I've been isolated for three days and three nights, without electricity, without power. A huge native land (there are very few left)." Joan Vantolra, responsible for the infrastructure where the Urgell Canal begins, is constantly sharing anecdotes with me. We're in a room with large iron wheels. He used to turn them manually in the early years he worked here. And that was thirty-three years ago!
The handwheels opened and closed the floodgates and regulated the flow of water. Juan used to invent a way of installing pulleys to reduce his effort. Now, handwheels are no longer used: everything is automated, and a computer is responsible for turning them.
I'm at kilometer 0 of the Urgell Canal, the starting point of this extremely important hydraulic infrastructure. The site, located in the municipality of Ponts, is known as the Tossal de Ponts dam.takeIt means where the water is taken from.
Juan lives with his wife (their daughter has already flown) in a house above the floodgates. Nearly 33,000 liters per second now flow beneath the house in the summer.
The Mestre siblings, Cristina, and Jordi, accompany me. Their great-grandfather, Ramon Gorné, worked here as a "dam maintenance guard." He must have been a hard worker, diligent and dedicated: his employment record states that he was given a bonus of 100 pesetas for a job well done. With a broad smile, Jordi tells me an anecdote he often tells: "My godfather, Sebastià, Ramón's son, was very fond of art. When he was 15, just after finishing work on this new dam and the floodgates, he made an extraordinary, faithful model, made of a lot of stone, all of stone, all of stone." The great-grandparents were advised to offer Sebastián art studies in Barcelona, but that was impossible due to the financial strain it would entail. Things that used to happen before?
The Maestros know the sad story of a crime that occurred here. The writer Vicenç Villatoro tells it in the book Urgell. The water fever"They killed the elderly couple who were still alive to steal their paychecks, which the thief never found, hiding behind a tile, and which turned up years later when some work was being done." "The murderer threw the woman's tied-up body into the canal water, which dragged her until her skirt got caught on a branch downstream. The man was found with his head frightened in the house itself." They caught him, the murderer. He was doing work on the dam. He was discovered by the house dog, who was entertaining all the day laborers who passed by... except one, at whom he barked rabiüt.
"That happened at a time when there were many workers here. Not like now, when there's almost never anyone here," remarks Maribel Pedrol, director of the Canals d'Urgell Foundation. "I can't stop thinking about the unsettling moments when my great-grandparents settled here, when the murder hadn't yet been solved," adds Jordi.
Joan Vantolra didn't experience this crime. However, he did experience the following incident: "A youthful car was returning to La Seu d'Urgell at night after having been out for a night out. The car went flying around a curve next to the canal and came down hard," he tells me. He came from an influential family. from the Headquarters who asked for the water to be stopped, without success. Then a bus full of people from La Seu came to demand that the water be stopped. The Civil Guard came. There were moments of tension, but I didn't confront them. Finally, there was an agreement: the water would not be stopped, but its flow would be reduced for the search for the body, which was found lifeless.
Maribel has led numerous guided tours of this little-known place. She passionately discusses the history and stories of the Urgell Canal and details of the heritage of our area. There is, for example, a Neo-Romanesque church. It's the Church of San Isidro (Labrador), designed by... Isidre (Puig Boada) in 1950. "Look at this painting of Christ on the cross," Maribel tells me when we're inside the church. "It was recently restored. Four days ago, you couldn't see it. It was dark. They could have lit a match on it and nothing would have happened."
A few hundred meters below the canal operations center building, there is another building with similar characteristics, also located above the canal. This is Ca l'Ermità. It was the original site for water intakes regulated by floodgates. The current building was inaugurated in 1913, and the original one—which had been badly damaged by a major flood—was destroyed.
We walked beneath the towers of Ca l'Ermità. "Here begins the Lenguadera tunnel, through which the water flows. Occasionally, there are landslides. That's why we don't allow visitors to pass through the Montclar tunnel. This tunnel, five kilometers long, had to be built so the water could continue its path; of deaths.
"The construction of the Montclar tunnel—and the entire canal—was directed by Domingo Cardenal. It's interesting because he was Basque, and we called him Domènec Cardenal. We Catalanized his name, and hail!" says Maribel. "We've made it our own: there are quite a few streets in municipalities in this area with this name. We just need to make him a saint!"
The well would not have water without the canal
"The Urgell Canal is a very important piece of infrastructure. Those who live on the plain irrigated by the Urgell Canal downplay the canal's importance and say, 'We already got our water from the well,' we need to remind them that the well wouldn't have water without the canal," remarks Maribel Pedrol, head of the Espai Cultural de les Canals de acequias.
"The water from the Urgell Canal is used for irrigation and provides water to animals, homes, and industry... It gives life to Urgell, the Pla d'Urgell, the Noguera, and the Garrigues. Some 120,000 inhabitants benefit."