Day 5: Navas - Sallent

On Sunday we continued down the well marked trail that connected the industrial colonies of the Llobregat. The town of Navas marked the first town of the comarca Bages, considered to be core of central Catalonia. Accompanied again by Angel Miralda, his wife and a friend, Hector and I had the morning to ask more questions about the river, its users, and history. Mid morning, near Balsareny, we encountered one of the Llobregat's oldest landmarks, the Sequia dels Manresans. This dam was originally built in the XIVth century by the city of Manresa to provide drinking water and irrigation. The city requested permission from king Pere III the cerimonious to divert water from the Llobregat and transport it 26 kilometers to Manresa. This medieval infrastructure include 30 aqueducts, and the canal from the Llobregat to Manresa only looses 10 meters in elevation despite traversing uneven terrain.

Later that afternoon, we passed the last of the well known industrial colonies, and said goodbye to our local guides. Discovering the history of the industrial colonies was a highlight of the trip thus far. In one old picture of the colony Viladomiu Nou, I noticed that the majestic home of the land owner and the factory was surrounded by bearen land. Not a single tree or bush was in sight. I was told that this was because of firewood collection. Whatever the cause, this picture from 1920 reminded me that restoration is not necessarily going back to the past, and that any restoration effort today of the Llobregat should consider that the area has already suffered considerable ecological alteration whose impacts are likely to remain.

It is well known that salt, NaCl, the same salt we put our our salad, is the most problematic contaminant in the Llobregat. The private water company Aigues de Barcelona (AGBAR) first to remediate the salty Llobregat in 1931 by creating a special commission to study the problem. Only six years earlier, in 1925, mining companies located upstream near Cardona and Sallent had begun extracting minerals from the earth and depositing their waste near the Llobregat or the Cardener river- its main tributary. The mines mostly sought potassium - a valuable mineral for producing fertilizers and explosives. The profitabitity of these mining activities allowed locals to overlook the environmental problems caused by the salt water runoff, especially during storm events, that frequently injected the Llobregat and Cardener with salty water.

In Vilafruns, I was able to witness the severity of the salt runoff. Only a few meters from the main stem of the Llobregat, a considerably large mountain of salt residue piled up into the sky. The base of the mountain was surrounded by a white gully filled with salt. As far as I could tell, this salt water drained into the groundwater, and probably directly into the Llobregat. I had been told that a special pipe had been build to channel the salty water to Mediterranean, but this work of remediation was not visible in Vilafruns. To be honest, I as astounded with what I saw.

In the afternoon, I met with Josep Ribera from the organization Prou Sal! He invited me to the evening meeting where I met the community organizers who have raised awareness about the issue. I learned that city wells have been contaminated by the salt water runoff, forcing the town of Sallent to invest millions in to water potabilization technology. The same can be said downstream at the water treatment plant in Abrera and Sant Joan Despi, where the newest desalinization and filtration technology is being installed in a freshwater river to remove salts and other contaminants from Barcelona's drinking water.

Another group working on the same issue, Montsalat, has an excellent webpage with more information about the historical grievances associated with the salt contamination caused by the mines.