Gecko Towers
Our Irish friends call it a “soft day”, but like my old Piaggio Vespa scooter – which I used come rain or shine to get to my office in London’s Mayfair – the Marbella rain has two gears, spitting and torrential.
Over the last three days I have emptied countless buckets full of rainwater that has fallen on our home in San Pedro de Alcantara. The 25 liter buckets are full to the brim and I have added to the water that has already irrigated our garden. I am clear in the knowledge that it’s a complete waste of the valuable resource and within two or three days the memories of a well-irrigated garden will have evaporated under the warm autumn sun!
Talking to a friend who has spent time in Australia, he was saying that many houses there are built with a basement drainage structure that captures rain water for later irrigation.
Architects, we are surrounded by the necessity to embrace sustainability, what can be meaningfully done to capture, clean and store this infrequent visitor to the Costa del Sol? We need to reduce our overall reliance on the scarce resources held in our local reservoirs or that are generated by the processes of desalination, which, as we know, are not free of environmental impact?
Checking the levels of water in the Embalse de la Concepcion, in the Istan region of Marbella, as at 10.00 this morning the level sat at 40.63% of full capacity. This is up from 39.50% on Friday – so up 1.13% in three days. This may sound like a modest figure but when you compare the totals with a week ago – measured in hm3 or cubic hectometers – it amounts (if my maths is correct) to 380,000,000 litres!!! And that’s a lot of buckets!
As a local barometer of the amount of rain that has fallen, a friend – who took our featured image – and is a keen cyclist for whom rain is a scourge – has a rainfall gauge in his garden. Since Monday, his gauge shows that circa 120 mm has fallen, which for our non-metric readers in almost 5 inches!!!
Keep an eye out for our posts for updates but so far I haven’t detected any particular movement from the Junta de Andalucia’s Drought Committee in response to this voluminous rainfall. All I do know is that for the as long as I can remember the San Pedro de Alcantara Féria will again be struggling with the weather. Felice Fiestas!
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