The drought of 2005 was the country's worst in more than half a century, and rainfall is continuing to become scarcer in the Iberian peninsula, said Francisco Pugnaire, a member of the state's Arid Zone Experimental Station. This year, water had to be shipped to Barcelona.
"We live as though droughts are the exception, and that model is no longer sufficient," Josep Puxeu, a senior official in Spain's Water and Rural Land Ministry, said at a recent international conference on drought held in Sevilla, Spain.
Castilla-La Mancha has long been arid, as Cervantes himself noted. But residents say they remember being able to scoop up water from shallow wells just a couple of decades ago. Now, wells have to be drilled 200 yards deep or more.
The Iberian peninsula has the richest biodiversity of the continent, including an estimated 150 flora and fauna species of varying degrees of rarity. Spain has nearly a million acres of officially designated protected land, much of it embracing wildlife refuges. Castilla-La Mancha, for example, is home to one of Europe's rare lynx habitats.
But tens of thousands of condos have been erected or were planned on the edges of 10 of Spain's most important national forests.
In the north, a ski resort, with 30 miles of runs and lifts that can carry 30,000 people per hour, is being built alongside a refuge for the endangered brown bear. South of here, houses pop up steadily inside a bird sanctuary.
And north of here, in the Avila region about an hour's drive from Madrid, environmentalists, along with a group of dissident city officials, have been fighting to stop the construction of 1,600 houses, a hotel and four golf courses in a protected pine forest and bird sanctuary.
Before a court intervened, 3,000 trees were chopped down, destroying part of the habitat of imperial eagles and black storks, an endangered species.
Environmentalists say they are encouraged by a new crop of court rulings in their favor, and by the fact that Spain's economic crisis is finally putting the brakes on construction.
But, they say, it is late, and the damage is done.
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wilkinson@latimes.com
