Sagunto clears Palancia riverbed at eight bridges to prevent flooding
Sagunto's Agriculture department is clearing vegetation from the Palancia riverbed at eight bridges across the city, through a summer jobs plan funded with €447,097 from Spain's national employment service.
Sagunto City Council's Agriculture department has stepped up flood-prevention work this week on the Palancia river (Río Palancia), the waterway that runs through the city. The work focuses on several of the bridges crossing the river, aiming to restore the riverbed's natural capacity, clear overly dense vegetation and reduce flood risk through selective clearing.
The clearing work is being carried out by rural maintenance crews from the summer jobs plan, funded with €447,097 by Spain's National Employment Service (SEPE — Servicio Público de Empleo Estatal). The council stresses this is purely conservation and maintenance work on public hydraulic land, not a change to the river's natural shape or any structural building work.
In total, the clearing is taking place at eight bridges across the city, covering an estimated 16,688 square metres. Sagunto's mayor, Darío Moreno, and the councillor for Agriculture, Ana María Quesada, visited the works this week at the Cronista Santiago Bru i Vidal bridge, the Cronista Emili Llueca bridge and the bridge in the San José neighbourhood of Puerto de Sagunto (Sagunto's coastal district), to check progress in person.
The crews are selectively removing dense blocking vegetation such as brambles, along with invasive or unhealthy trees, plus debris and other material that could obstruct the water flow. Everything cleared is removed from the riverbed straight away, so it cannot become an extra obstacle or fuel for wildfires.
The Palancia has a history of dangerous flooding in the area: the Algar dam, upstream of the stretch now being cleared, became infamous for not having its floodgates installed during the "gota fría" storm of October 2000, one of the region's most remembered flooding episodes. That history is a key reason the council is acting now, before the autumn rains arrive.
Moreno stressed that keeping the riverbed and the bridge openings clear is essential to stop built-up vegetation from blocking the water flow during heavy storms and causing flooding. Quesada explained that the Agriculture department is combining this work with its usual care of farmland, and thanked the SEPE crews for their commitment. According to the councillor, two bridges were already cleared last winter by a contracted company, while this summer the jobs-plan crews are handling the remaining six; work on the San José bridge is almost finished and continues at the other sites.
This work adds to clearing carried out last year at the river's first two bridges in Sagunto, part of a riverbed maintenance plan the council has been running since at least 2017. According to aytosagunto.es, with additional background from Wikipedia on the Palancia river.