“A house in the desert”: Reconfigurations of water and time by mothers of Barcelona
Ana Cerezuela, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
View from just outside my home during the orange weather alert that affected parts of the Region of Murcia (Spain) in March 2025. Photo by Ana Cerezuela.
In the summer of 2024, we sat with 33 mothers and asked them about the end of the world. They all lived in Barcelona and were either pregnant or had children under 3 years old. We wanted to hear their stories of motherhood in times of climate crisis and understand how the degradation of the urban environment had changed human acts of reproduction, care, and imagining the future. Our sample consisted primarily of middle-class women of Catalan origin, aged between 30 and 50, with higher education and employment. However, their experiences varied depending on the type of employment, salary, and status as a homeowner or renter.
The mothers who generously spoke for hours with me and the rest of the research team—a small group of anthropologists asking very difficult questions—confessed that motherhood had placed them amid a sea of invisible threats. The experience of becoming parents changed how the participants thought about the environmental risks they faced in the city, as it transformed abstract concerns into immediate and tangible threats that were closely related to their specific socio-economic and material contexts. Few of them explicitly used the term “climate anxiety” to describe their concerns, but when we brought up the question of the planet’s future, they shared some rather daunting apocalyptic projections that were tangled up in their intimate experiences in the present, and which ultimately came to represent the future that awaited their children.
When we asked about their present-day concerns, they talked about the noise, the overcrowded streets, the sweltering heat, the seemingly unavoidable gentrification of their neighbourhoods, the smoke and pollution seeping into their rented homes through the old windows –never to be replaced by the landlords– and children playing in meadows of concrete and rubber.
But when we asked about the future, many of them talked about water.
During the months we conducted interviews, Barcelona was affected by a prolonged drought alert that led to water use restrictions throughout central Catalonia. Although reservoirs were slowly replenishing throughout the summer, there was much to recover from the ‘emergency’ level drought that exhausted local water supplies from February to May. In response, and as a preventive measure in anticipation of future droughts in the area, local authorities recommended water-saving measures such as restrictions on irrigation and the refilling of swimming pools.
Laia, a doctoral student, was pregnant that summer. At the time of our interview, she was a beneficiary of paid maternal leave, living in the Nou Barris district with her partner and their two-year-old son. As she told us, once she had her son, the scenario of a future without access to water suddenly became darker and more tangible to her than ever before. In this uncertain context, the high temperatures of the Barcelona summer and the warnings of water shortages shaped her discourse into a specific picture of the future, which she herself described with some doubt as the fruit of deep climate anxiety.
This summer or last summer, with the drought... Wow, I was thinking really catastrophic. I thought, “Where are we headed? This is all only going to get worse” (…) It can't be avoided, but it has also affected me more, as... I don't know how to say it; it’s like climate anxiety.
(Laia, Nou Barris)
The drought inspired images of an arid, hostile future in Barcelona, where mothers projected the adult lives of their now-infants or toddlers. Another participant, Inés, was a psychologist from the northwest of Spain who had been based in Barcelona for more than 15 years. At the time of the interview, Inés was on maternity leave and confessed that her self-employed status left her feeling financially vulnerable during this period. She and her partner lived in the Raval neighbourhood, where they raised their two-month-old baby. She reflected on the world her daughter would inherit and the disastrous future awaiting the younger generation.
Of course, I think about what kind of world we are going to leave her in, right? (…) I think about whether this will be a desert. For instance, we are now looking into buying a house. And sometimes I think, “what are we passing on to her, a house in the desert?” Because by the time she's, I don't know, 30, 40 years old, this is all going to be a desert, isn't it?
(Inés, lactating participant from Ciutat Vella district)
On the day I interviewed her by video call, she was visiting her childhood home. With a note of surprise and resignation, she told me that her daughter was only then discovering true calm. As she watched her sleep peacefully for the first time in her grandparents' house, far from the hectic centre of Barcelona, Inés pondered the anguishing promise of making her heir to a house in the middle of an inhospitable landscape.
Other mothers also recounted the landscapes of their childhoods and how these spaces had shaped their expectations of what a healthy environment for growing up should be like. Their stories conveyed a sense of loss for those familiar landscapes, as well as great uncertainty in the face of the rapid transformation of the places that their own children were to inhabit. For women who had forged a connection to the future through reproduction, their sense of “solastalgia”—the pain caused by ongoing deterioration of one’s home environment (Albrecht et al., 2007) —was coupled with feelings of climate anxiety and maternal guilt.
Although the risk of desertification that the Iberian Peninsula faces as a result of climate change does not necessarily translate into the total transformation of the territory into a desert, it does imply a significant degradation of the land, with important consequences for the sustainability of life. In Spain, studies on the effects of climate change predict more erratic rainfall patterns and an increase in the risk and intensity of droughts and floods. By the end of the century, rivers in the most vulnerable areas will have 30-40% less water.
While average annual rainfall is expected to decrease, heavy rainfall events are projected to increase in some regions. These rains, however, do not favour the recharging of aquifers, as intense, short-duration rainfalls do not allow enough time for water to infiltrate the soil. They also bring with them a greater risk of flooding, a weather event that causes the most material and human losses in Spain (MITECO, 2020).
Severe droughts and floods are well-known consequences of climate change. Yet, in my conversations with the mothers over the spring and summer of 2024, they mentioned these disasters as a distant possibility, perhaps due to their lack of firsthand experience of major climate catastrophes.
After a summer of heat and anxieties of desertification, however, came the water.
In October 2024, still halfway through our fieldwork, there was a historical natural disaster caused by an upper-level low-pressure system (DANA) in several areas of southeastern and eastern Spain, resulting in torrential downpours of more than 600 l/m2, or what one journalist described as “a year’s worth of rainfall in a matter of hours” (Niranjan, 2024). In the province of Valencia, where some of the deadliest floods occurred, 227 people lost their lives.
This catastrophe has transformed local people’s perception of what inhabited the here-and-now and what inhabited more distant spaces and times. For many of the women interviewed in the aftermath of the event, its proximity to their homes in Barcelona—barely 300 km to the south—and impact on people they knew transformed distant anxieties about a future marked by the unpredictability, unreliability, and potential dangers of water into immediate concerns about its impact on present life.
It has shocked me deeply that people are dying in the Western world in 2024 due to a flood.
(Montse, participant parent from Horta-Guinardó district)
Surprise was one of the first things Montse, a first-time mother born and raised in Barcelona, expressed in response to the Valencia floods. Her disbelief reveals an implicit expectation that mass fatalities resulting from weather catastrophes should not occur in places located in the “developed West.” Her surprise attests to how such events are generally imagined to inhabit the past, a post-apocalyptic future, or geographies perceived as more vulnerable in the collective imagination.
Today, heightened awareness of environmental risks affecting pregnancy and childbearing suspends mothers in a state of “folded temporality” (Mansfield, 2017), where present and future collide and their boundaries blur together, creating an additional burden of responsibility for women and pregnant people. Our participants’ discourses around their environmental worries and coping strategies emphasize the social pressure experienced by mothers to protect their children from environmental risks, or what scholars have called the “politics of maternal responsibility” (Ford, 2020). They may not be able to change global dynamics on their own, but they still hope to influence the future through their care. I specifically recall the words of Alba, the mother of a three-month-old girl, about her own agency in parenting:
I cannot change the world, but I can change my world for her. That is the only thing I can pass on to her as an inheritance, to try and make her happy in the environment she has. And then the rest of the factors, she will have to get used to dealing with them, as we all do.
(Alba, L’Eixample district)
Our research team is also partially rooted in the Spanish Mediterranean coast, where people understand the language of water. Those of us who have grown up in these coastal areas have come to distinguish “good rain” from “bad rain.” Good rain is gentle and steady, nourishing and easy on the soil. Bad rain washes away homes, fields, cars, and bodies, transforming landscapes into perilous rivers. When there is no rain at all, everything green fades to yellow, and every now and then, a wildfire steals a piece of land and air.
This intergenerational knowledge of the Levante’s geographic vulnerability to the extremes of water—both shortage and excess—is ingrained in the histories and intimate experiences of the landscape. The interviewees' shock at the fatal consequences of the rain in Valencia points to a disconnection from these experiences of vulnerability, even a sense of detachment or immunity, that extreme events such as the Valencia DANA inevitably shatter.
I am writing this piece almost a year later, from a region in south-eastern Spain that is currently under another orange alert for torrential rain. Schools have been closed for the past three days. Local authorities have advised residents to avoid all travel due to the possible overflow of the surrounding rivers. And yet, many of the nurses at the primary care centre closest to my home continue to come to work with their children, who keep busy by placing barcode stickers on medical documents or doing their homework in the waiting room. I find myself thinking of all the ways mothers of the climate change generation teach us how to cultivate and sustain life, in spite of deep uncertainty.
The crisis is already here. It is in the inescapable heat, the unruly presence of water, and the pollution we breathe in from the very beginning of life. In these precarious normalities, it is our determination to conquer the future through care that fuels our collective and intimate battles to sustain health and life.