30 Day Map Challenge - Day 2: Lines

Here I present to you an ancient, yet exceptional, infrastructure aimed to soften summer droughts.

To add some context, Sierra Nevada (a mountain range located in the South of Spain that beholds the higher peaks of the Iberian Peninsula) has a Mediterranean climate, this is that during the summer precipitations are very scarce. Yet, that didn't stop the area to be populated. Since its altitude, a good percentage of the precipitation is snow; snow that is immobilized until thawing is started in spring. That would create a highly variation between summer and spring in the available water.

Nonetheless, during the Muslim period of the peninsula (or maybe it was the Romans, it is not fully clear), the people created a series of ditches that took advantage of the shallow aquifer (present in all the Sierra Nevada) to delay the discharge of water. Such ditches are known as "careo ditches". In this way, they successfully increased the water available during the summer.

Such infrastructure is so important that nowadays entire municipalities (and ecosystems) depend on them to keep a constant water supply.

#30DayMapChallenge #spain #SierraNevada #careo #socioecology