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Around midnight of 9 January 1959, the Vega de Tera dam broke, releasing nearly 8 million cubic metres of water that destroyed the Spanish town of Ribadelago, killing 144 people. To this day, it remains the worst dam-related failure of the past two centuries of Spanish history. In this chapter we expand the time frame of the disaster, moving from a one-day narrative to focus on the processes of re

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in anarchism from both social movements and critical academic circles. When tracing the genealogy of anarchist perspectives since the nineteenth century, radical geographers have pointed out the importance of the anarchist movement in Spain, and particularly in the city of Barcelona. During the 1960s and 1970s, authors like Murray Bookchin shared

At the intersection of natural and social sciences, interest in river sedimentary fluxes and their alteration by human activities is increasing in the context of general retreat of delta formations. Since the 1950s, the construction of large dams in the main course of rivers has produced, among other impacts, a radical decrease in sedimentary fluxes — a key factor in the worldwide sedimentary cris

The history of hydraulic infrastructures is plagued with failures often with catastrophic consequences. Although the agency of water in disasters has been widely documented less well known are the substances in water such as salt that may cause infrastructural collapse and harm humans, flora and fauna. In the Llobregat River Basin (Barcelona), a 120-km long pipe transports salt-saturated wastewate

During the Spanish Civil War, the battle for the defense of Madrid attracted international attention. It was on the streets of the capital where the unprofessional republican troops first managed to stop the best units of the Spanish army, while German aircraft put into practice bombing tactics that would later use during World War II. The control of urban hydrogeography in Madrid played a key rol

After a century of accelerating drainage, in the 1960s coastal wetlands became the object of unprecedented protection campaigns around the world. This paper compares the history of three successful cases of coastal wetland protection in the Mediterranean between the 1960s and 1980s: the Rhône (France), Po (Italy), and Ebro (Spain) River deltas. As most of the coast of Mediterranean Europe, these t

To effectively navigate out of the climate crisis, a new interdisciplinary approach is needed to guide and facilitate research that integrates diverse understandings of how transitions evolve in intertwined social–environmental systems. The concept of tipping points, frequently used in the natural sciences and increasingly in the social sciences, can help elucidate processes underlying major socia

Increasing economic, social and environmental limits to the development of conventional water supply sources have shifted water resource frontiers to alternative sources, most notably desalination and wastewater reuse. In the past few years, critical scholarship has been prolific in its exploration of how desalination may redraw the hydrosocial cycle in different geographies; wastewater reuse, how