What until recently was a summer resort by the sea has become a symbol of the new climatic reality in Catalonia. A dozen residents of Serramar, in Alcanar Platja (Montsià), will be the first climate displaced persons in the country. Their houses, built next to the Llop ravine, will be demolished after years of floods that can no longer be contained with provisional measures.
The houses are located right in front of the Els Alfacs campsite, next to the old N-340, and are literally inside the natural channel where the water flows down to the sea when it rains heavily. In recent years, the storms have intensified: since 2018 alone, the neighbors have suffered four major floods.
The last one, triggered by squall Alice, was the most violent. “Everything looked like a sea. The amount of water and the force it had, we had never seen it before,” says Dídac Pla, one of those affected, in a report by 3Cat.
An unprecedented decision
The City Council of Alcanar and the Generalitat de Catalunya have already started the procedures to expropriate and demolish the houses. The administrations agree that there is no other solution: “It’s not that they are near the ravine, it’s that they are inside the ravine,” explained the councilor of Territori, Sílvia Paneque.
The neighbors themselves agree with the measure. “We have discussed it with the mayor. The only viable option is expropriation. We are in the middle of a ravine,” Pla tells 3Cat. The goal is to relocate the families to other safe areas of the municipality.
In Alcanar they know what living on the water’s edge is all about. Between 1980 and 2020 more than 40 episodes of flooding were recorded in the area, and 21 directly affected the municipality. But the frequency and intensity have increased so much that the urban geography is starting to move.
The Alcanar case marks a before and after.It is the first time in Catalonia that it has been decided to demolish inhabited houses for reasons directly related to the climate crisis. And although the ten residents of Serramar will be the first to leave, everything points to the fact that they will not be the last.
Because on the Catalan coast from Tarragona to Maresme each cold drop leaves a reminder: climate change is not a future threat, but something that is already reshaping the map.