(MENAFN- Gulf Times) When Vicente Nieto recalls the first years of his life in the village of La Muedra, his eyes fill with tears.
'I feel so sorry when I go to see La Muedra. I'm very old, but I still keep crying, the 86-year-old says at his home in the nearby village of Vinuesa in northern Soria province.
An ongoing drought, one of Spain's worst in decades, has brought to light the ruins of dozens of villages including La Muedra that residents were forced to abandon after they were submerged by dam reservoirs built mainly under Francisco Franco, who ruled as a dictator from 1939 to 1975.
'We had a house ... [and] a pen for cows, sheep and mares. We also had a very big vegetable garden where lambs entered to get some sun. I remember it all as if it still existed, Nieto recalls.
Stone structures of former houses of La Muedra can now again be seen, as well as the stone arches of what was once a forge. The slender church tower rises from the water, next to the remains of an elm under which Nieto and his companions played on Sundays: 'The tree was hollow, and we went inside its trunk.
The elderly man also remembers going to buy nuts in the village's only tavern with coins that adults gave to the local children.
The 300 residents lived mainly off farming and cattle, Nieto says.
'They sowed mainly cereals, like wheat, barley and rye, but there were also vegetable gardens that were irrigated with water from the River Duero.
Nieto left La Muedra at age 4 with his parents and three siblings when the authorities approved the construction of the Cuerda del Pozo dam.
The village started receiving workers to build the dam in the 1930s, while residents gradually moved away.
'The village fell apart, sighs Nieto, whose family's lands were expropriated.
The last family to hold out in La Muedra in the late 1930s was that of teacher Manuel Rodriguez, whose daughter Manoli, 83, recalls their final days in the village.
'My father was finally teaching only one child. In the end, only two families remained, and when they went to sleep, both of them put lanterns on their doors as a sign that they were okay.
By the time the dam was inaugurated in 1941, everyone was gone.
Manoli Rodriguez now lives in Renieblas, another village in Soria. She sometimes goes to see the ruins of La Muedra, in the embrace of a peaceful landscape where only the ripples of water and the mooing of cows break the silence.
'I only remember ... the tree on the square, where we always played, and the river. I recall the river a lot, says the woman, who left the village at age 3.
Before Manoli was born, her father taught at a school in Madrid. He yearned to return to his roots in Soria and settled in La Muedra, where Manoli and her six siblings were born.
'When my mother first saw La Muedra, she said; ‘This is paradise on earth', Rodriguez recalls. 'We had a garden with pears, apples, grapes, cherries, strawberries... And a fairly large stone house.
She later lived in Paris for over a decade, but ended up following in her father's footsteps and returning to her region of origin.
The case of La Muedra, which resurfaced from the reservoir after its waters fell to 21 per cent of their usual level, is not the only one of its kind in Spain.
In the northern region of La Rioja, the village of Mansilla de la Sierra has come into view to the extent that its former residents can walk where its streets once lay.
Another village to reappear is Portomarin in the north-eastern Galicia region, which was evacuated when a dam was built there in 1962.
While the view of such ghost villages awakens nostalgic memories, their former residents know that the dam waters will rise again and bury a past that cannot be revived. DPA
APPEARANCE: Water covers the plaza of La Muedra, a village in Spain that has been submerged for the last several decades. The village's slender church tower and the remains of an elm are the last vestiges of the area.
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