Filtered out along with the traffic and the noise, urban graffiti tends to speak only to those who are already naturally receptive to the medium.  But here in the rice fields of the Delta, there’s no traffic nor noise, and so passing by the only building on the only road through here, the messages daubed across its brick walls are impossible to ignore.

The Catalans, and indeed the Spanish in general, have long since used graffiti as way of airing political issues and thereby politicising public space.  Anyone with a can of spray paint can see to it that their grievance is heard, and riding around the Ebro Delta with its abundance of slogan covered walls, it doesn’t take too long to realise that this is an area mired in a number of deep seated and acrimonious conflicts.

Having born witness to decisive battles in both the Second Punic war, which saw the Romans  defeat the Carthaginians in a naval battle on the river, and the Spanish Civil war, where after heavy Republican losses the country eventually fell to fascism, the current divisions in the Ebro region look set to continue until the Delta finally sinks into the Mediterranean Sea forever.

Although essentially a natural phenomenon, the size and shape of the River Ebro delta is largely the result of upstream deforestation and overgrazing.  It has been a Natural Park since 1983, and as one of Europe’s largest wetland areas, its beaches, marshes, rice fields and salt pans are home to hundreds of species of flora and fauna.  Of these, the region is perhaps most well known for its flocks of pink flamingo.

As one of only a handful of similar sites worldwide, the Delta attracts an international array of biologists, ecologists and ornithologists.  The combination of fierce summer mosquitoes and a glaring lack of diversion ensures that they’re amongst the only visitors here.

Having originally risen out of the sea, the region had to be artificially populated with rice farmers from the València region.  Much later, Franco established a farming settlement, “Villafranco del Delta,” expressly for the purpose of aiding rice production.  It was controversially renamed to “El Poblenou del Delta” in 2003.

With neatly irrigated paddies taking up more than half the cultivable land, the contrived and unsustainable nature of rice production here has resulted in serious water contamination problems.  The older generation of farmers have so far been resistant to calls for more sustainable farming practices, and this has understandably led to tensions with ecologists, organic farmers, and ecotourism companies.

Ironically, the famers have had to unite with the ecologists in unanimous opposition to the “Plan Hidrológico Nacional,” a complicated and extremely controversial series of political proposals which intend to address water shortages in Barcelona and València by diverting water from and damning parts of the Ebro River.  Throughout the Delta, the knotted pipeline is prominently displayed as both a symbol of resistance to the plan and the emblem of the political social platform - “Plataforma en Defensa del Ebro.”

Over the last century, upstream damns have drastically reduced the levels of sediment that the Ebro once brought to its Delta, and for a while now, the rate of sea erosion has greatly exceeded that of sediment replenishment.  These problems, when coupled with rising sea levels and the fact that tectonic subsistence and soil compaction is causing the land to sink, mean that the Delta and the community it supports are facing an extremely uncertain future.

The semi-landlocked Mediterranean has virtually no tide, and so land reclamation techniques such as those used in the Netherlands cannot save the area.  Strangely, as if oblivious to the fact that the current generation will probably be the last to live here, new building works continue regardless.