Speaker
Description
Canal Imperial de Aragón is one of the most significant hydraulic infrastructures throughout Europe and probable the most ambitious project in the history of Aragón. The project dates to 1528, at the time Acequia Imperial was being conceived, though it was built in the last quarter of the XVIII century. From Fontellas (Navarre) to Fuentes de Ebro (Aragón), this infrastructure has over 100 kilometers of constructed channels for navigation and irrigation purposes.
Initially, the plan was conceived to overcome the meanders of the Ebro River in its middle segment, making it navigable and with a connection to the sea for exchanging agricultural products purposes. Although only one part of it was completed, it constitutes a significant example of a flood irrigation system, as it supplies water to a total of 26,500 hectares irrigated lands on the left bank of the canal, extending to the banks of the Ebro River, with a smooth slope, which allows navigation in both directions.
This area constitutes an example of ancestral agricultural landscapes, built according to soil fertility, scarce water resource, and based on a social organization founded on the collective right to water and land (Ruiz-Varona et al., 2022). The evolution of these landscapes has been closely intertwined with the urban activity, mostly represented by the functional urban areas and main cities that sustained them, among others, Zaragoza. This landscape presents a notorious fragmented mosaic of urbanized territory, while contains spaces of high environmental value, typically of peri-urban dynamics that occur in the interface between agricultural stressed by the pressure of urbanization. However, this enclave of traditional agriculture landscape constitutes a unique heritage in Europe that dates back over a thousand years and are significant for its identity (García-Mayor & Canales-Martínez, 2017).
The spatial and functional complexity of these areas is also determined by the increasingly higher demands for water use control, since irrigators are required to report their water consumption and keep their crop records updated (MITERD, 2023), but at the same time, preserving its environmental and cultural landscape values. Traditional flood irrigation (riego a manta) is organized through irrigation rotation systems and rights allocated to plots. To cover all these plots, ditches and gates are located over the 26 irrigation communities that cover the canal. However, there is a risk of altering this landscape if a more accurate method for calculating water consumption is obtain, instead of the currently used, which relies on land surfaces and historical data.
This work analyzes the main significant elements that characterize this infrastructure, such as locks, or constructions with greater symbolic value, such as Fuente de los Incrédulos, to provide objective reasoning of how these elements have shaped from the past the cultural heritage from today. The study is based on the analysis of the main existing ancient cartographic documents. In addition, based on Geographic Information Systems, this study reconstructs the hierarchy and topological dependencies of all the existing elements (main and secondary irrigation ditches, locks, and floodgates) that comprises the current irrigation network of the Imperial Canal of Aragon. Findings also contribute to clarify the role of this hydraulic infrastructure as a key element of cultural and heritage value within the territory, while also summarizing the main actions currently being implemented to ensure balanced water management without impacting or risking this peri-urban landscape.
References
García-Mayor, C., & Canales Martínez, G. (2017). Catral, de la huerta tradicional a la huerta urbanizada. La transformación del paisaje agrario en el Bajo Segura: del animus regandi al animus aedificandi. Cuadernos de Turismo, 39, 191. https://doi.org/10.6018/turismo.39.290501
MITERD, 2023. Ministerio para la transición ecológica y el reto demográfico. Available from: www.miteco.gob.eshttps://cpage.mpr.gob.es
Ruiz-Varona, A., García Martín, F. M., Temes-Cordovez, R., García-Mayor, C., & Casas-Villarreal, L. (2022). Harmonization of land-cover data to assess agricultural land transformation patterns in the peri-urban Spanish Mediterranean Huertas. Journal of Land Use Science, 17(1), 523–539. https://doi.org/10.1080/1747423X.2021.2022793
| Keywords | Agricultural landscapes; GIS; Hidraulic infrastructure; Traditional Irrigation; Aragónt |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
