I once drove five hours for a fish and ended up staring at mud. Just mud. No lake. No shimmer. No waterline. No frogs croaking in the reeds. Just a bleached-out landscape and one dog chewing something it definitely shouldn’t have found in the heat.
Thing is, I’d been there before. Same spot. Zahara-El Gastor. Used to be glorious. Deep blue. Silky calm in the mornings. You could drop in a bait and the carp came up like ghosts. I once fell asleep on the bank there and woke up to a screaming line and no shoes. Magic.
Now it looked like a battlefield. Like someone unplugged it.
And I just stood there, half-laughing, half-ready to cry, holding a rod like some tragic Shakespeare character who refuses to accept the plot’s moved on.
They say it’s climate. Or irrigation. Or mismanagement. Or drought. Or all of it. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I’m a bloke with sunburn who wants to fish.
But you can’t fish a memory.
You ever try casting into dust? It’s humbling. The lure just thuds into cracked ground and you feel stupid in your boots. It’s not even the not-catching that gets you. It’s the realisation that the whole system’s knackered and nobody seems to be panicking except the fish and the weirdos like me who still show up.
There was this one guy I met near Badajoz last summer. Little tackle shop. Sold me worms that looked like they’d been in the fridge with onions. He just shrugged when I asked about the reservoir drop. “Normal,” he said. “Like always.”
Not always, mate.
I’ve been coming here twenty years. I remember when La Serena looked like an ocean. Now you can walk across parts of it. And I mean walk. I saw a bloke pushing a pram through what used to be a marina. No irony.
It’s not just the water going. It’s the fish, the insects, the birds. The rhythm of the place. You used to hear frogs at night. Now it’s just dry air and the occasional mozzie who refuses to die.
Fishing changes too. You have to adapt. Go early. Smaller rigs. Don’t bother with the deep spots — they’re gone. Fish are hiding. Low oxygen. Lethargic. Like they’ve been punched in the face by the weather.
Caught a barbel last August that looked embarrassed to be alive.
Some lads have given up. I get it. It’s easier. Less heartbreak. You drive all that way, you want water. Not a heatstroke and a sad sandwich by a ditch.
But I keep going. I don’t even know why. Habit maybe. Or denial. Or something deeper. Because when you do catch one — in a shrinking puddle, against all odds — it’s like you’ve beat the system. Like you’ve whispered, “Not yet.” And the water, what’s left of it, whispers back.
I don’t have answers. No big finish. No tips or clever hooks.
Just this: if you’re heading to a Spanish lake this summer, check the levels. Call someone. Don’t trust Google Maps — it still thinks half these lakes exist.
And if you get there and it’s gone, and you feel like swearing at the sky, go ahead.
Then brew a coffee, sit in the dirt, and remember what it used to be like. That’s fishing now, too.
The waiting, even when there’s nothing left to wait for.
