The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains

“You must plant the rain before you plant a seed or tree!” proclaimed rain farmer Mr. Zephaniah Phiri Maseko of Zimbabwe. By doing just that, he and his family turned a wasteland into an oasis, raised groundwater and well levels even in dry years, reduced flooding in wet years, and enhanced the fertility of the soils. This inspiring story will be shared along with the strategies used, and more importantly, the guiding principles that informed the choice, placement, and implementation of these strategies into a more integrated and productive system. These principles work in any climate experiencing a dry season or drought. And they help us see and act more holistically by asking us questions that direct our attention to important aspects of water and fertility systems we might otherwise overlook.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=D6_WZ789lpM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=D6_WZ789lpM</a>

I&#x27;m not sure why BBC finds it so fascinating that the Moors were able to dig ditches and channel water through them 500 years after the Romans had built highly advanced aqueducts in Spain (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aqueduct_of_Segovia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aqueduct_of_Segovia</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fascinatingspain.com&#x2F;place-to-visit&#x2F;the-best-of&#x2F;the-other-roman-aqueducts-in-spain&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fascinatingspain.com&#x2F;place-to-visit&#x2F;the-best-of&#x2F;the-...</a>). All I can guess is that some civilizations are more in vogue than others. In fact when the Moors invaded Spain, they destroyed much of the Roman infrastructure in a fit of religious fanaticism so a great deal of it has been lost.

OK, I have nothing bad to say about acequias or irrigation. Having grown up with a big orchad at home I enjoyed watching all those water inventions. Not sure about &quot;Moorish&quot;. More like &quot;muslim era&quot; heritage?<p>&quot;Making life possible in one of Europe&#x27;s driest regions&quot; is misleading though.<p>Eastwards Sierra Nevada you find Almería, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. It&#x27;s indeed a desertic zone, just not a very big extension.<p>The hyperbolic headline somehow implies a scale that&#x27;s not real. In any other direction from Sierra Nevada, there&#x27;s plenty of rain, water and woods. That system just provides the same for some villages on the drier zones.<p>Edit: OK, people disagree... so be it, but before downvoting, why don&#x27;t you take a look at Google Earth and see for yourself?

There’s a Dutch company called Groasis that had the nifty idea of planting a tree that goes though a bucket of water, the bucket slowly leaks water into the ground.<p>Groasis:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.groasis.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;technology&#x2F;how-does-the-reforestation-and-anti-desertification-technology-of-groasis-work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.groasis.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;technology&#x2F;how-does-the-reforesta...</a><p>The mass of the water provides thermal regulation as well as a trickle of water, which can catch rain as well as being topped up manually.<p>The overall goal is for the tree to grow down to the aquifer and then thrive. It helps a lot if there’s work to catch storm runoff into the aquifer.<p>The OP is more about conveying water through the aquifer.<p>Edit: URL added

I don’t know why I find water harvesting so fascinating, nifty use of aquifers.<p>There was a civilisation in the Sahara that had tunnels in the mountain that provided water, I imagine they ran dry.<p>Persia had (has?) underground tunnels that convey water to farmland.<p>With the increasing amount of heavy rain fall I’m not sure how much of that can be caught and sequestered.<p>This was made all the more apparent when there was a sudden downpour in London some years back and the river Fleet, sewer as it is now backed up into the office’s canteen.

These are cool. One of these gravity-driven miniature aqueducts still flows from the Sierra Nevada directly between Plaza Larga and las Pesas at one of the highest points in the Albaycin in Granada, and (I&#x27;ve heard) is accessible through the basements of the buildings there. It&#x27;s extremely impressive that someone engineered running water to a hill that high from an even higher source miles away across deep ravines, and that it still flows.

The Native Americans in Arizona had developed something similar, long before Europeans showed up.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arizona_bajada_canals" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arizona_bajada_canals</a>

There must be hundreds of places around the world who could make use of this.<p>How many other ones in Spain have been abandoned?<p>If this was established by the Moors then I would guess other ex-Moor states would have a similar setup.

&gt; All these customs are being lost and young people don&#x27;t want to know about it<p>I don&#x27;t understand why this knowledge isn&#x27;t being written down.

How does that differ from ancien Rome&#x27;s aqueducts?

Is this more similar to the spring-flow tunnel, or the Persian qanat?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qanat#Qanat_vs._spring-flow_tunnel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qanat#Qanat_vs._spring-flow_tu...</a>

*Moopish invention

Kind of a low-tech or primative aquaduct.

The article is about some low-tech but historically effective water-management techniques, brought to Spain by the Muslim conquest (711-721). It walks back very quickly on the headline&#x27;s claim of &quot;invention&quot;. And mentions that similar techniques were independently invented in other parts of the world.<p>Note: &quot;Moor&quot; is both a wretchedly vague exonym, and often a mild ethnic slur.