The Order of the Puppy organizes the talk Manuel Díaz Rijo and the 1964 Water Treatment Plant, which will be given by Luis Díaz Feria. The event will take place on Wednesday, April 30th, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hotel Lancelot Playa in Arrecife.
The activity is part of the 60th anniversary of the commissioning of the first water treatment plant on the island, for which the Order of the Canary Puppy in Lanzarote has programmed commemorative days under the generic title The Water That Wasn't There.
The author will focus on the ideation and imagination by his father, Manuel Díaz Rijo, of an exceptional event that enabled the development of Lanzarote. This is the conception and solo development of the engineering project of a land-based water treatment plant for human consumption, the first of its kind in Europe.
Luis Díaz Feria is an architect from the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid (1979). Full member of the Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Humanities of Lanzarote (2009). Curator of the exhibition «Memory of Water», which contextualizes the transcendent moment of the implementation of the water treatment plant (Casa Amarilla, 2018).
Manuel Díaz Rijo was invested as an Honorary Puppy by the Order of the Canary Puppy in Lanzarote in 2012, considering him "the architect of the miracle of water in Lanzarote". On the occasion of his investiture, the following was recorded: "In the spring of 1965, seawater, transformed into potable water, began to circulate through the distribution network of Arrecife. At that time, one of the first seawater desalination plants installed on land in the world began to operate. That project was inspired by an experimental plant that, at that time, had been installed in San Diego, California."
Manuel Díaz Rijo himself explained the origin of the idea in life: "Sitting in the Retiro Park in Madrid with the then mayor of Arrecife, Don Ginés de la Hoz, we began to talk about the reason that had brought him to the capital, which was none other than the deep crisis produced in Lanzarote by the lack of water. In that conversation, it occurred to me to propose to the mayor to consider Lanzarote as a large ship anchored in the Atlantic, among whose machinery a seawater desalination plant was included. It was not reasonable that, surrounded by that large amount of salt water, we were unable to transform it into potable water, and thereby break the bottleneck that was hindering our future development."