Manuel Díaz Rijo passed away this Tuesday, June 14, at the age of 88 in Madrid due to natural causes. Díaz Rijo, a professional engineer, was the creator of the desalination plants of Lanzarote, which he launched in the 1960s. The arrival of drinking water to the island meant a transcendental social and economic change for the people of Lanzarote.
Although born in Lanzarote, Díaz Rijo left the island with his family at the end of the civil war to go to the peninsula. In Madrid, he began his studies to become a naval engineer and, from a very young age, he took advantage of this training to investigate the possibility of making seawater drinkable. His research, until he found the optimal formula for the island, lasted for years and even took him to the United States. His project materialized in 1965. Until then, drinking water arrived to the island through tanker ships.
On the occasion of his proclamation for Los Dolores, in 2011, this engineer recounted his adventure, from when he had the idea of desalinating water for Lanzarote homes until he managed to put it into practice. "When I finished my degree, I stayed in Madrid as a professor at the school, because they gave me the chair in physics and fluid mechanics. I also started teaching at a naval research institute. That's where I really started receiving information about water purification plants," he explained then. "Without water, nothing could be done. In the 60s, Spain began to develop and open up to tourism and Lanzarote could not be left behind. Therefore, I think it was the right occasion to try to make my project work," he stressed.
The idea arose after Díaz Rijo learned that in large ships they were beginning to adapt seawater for human consumption. "They used rudimentary systems that were very expensive. This project could not be directly transferred to Lanzarote, because we needed the water to be cheap so that it could be assumed by the then humble population of the island," explained the engineer. It then occurred to him to link the production of water to the production of electricity, and he moved to Lanzarote to launch his preliminary project.
It was upon receiving information from water purification plants in the United States, when he observed that his project for the island was "viable". "I moved to the USA, to New York. I contacted the firm Westinghouse Electric. We debated all the points of the project and came to outline what was the optimal system for the Lanzarote of that time," said Díaz Rijo in 2011.
Years in search of funding for his project
That trip took place in 1961, but the engineer still spent another 4 years until he could put desalination into practice in Lanzarote. With an idea and a defined project, the naval engineer then needed something fundamental: funding. According to himself, it was not easy to achieve it, as very few believed in the viability of his proposal. "Officially the only one who supported me was the mayor of Arrecife, Ginés de la Hoz, who had faith. He said that in the situation we were in, we had to bet that my project would be successful. However, the president of the Cabildo, who was then José Ramírez Cerdá, did not agree. He was more responsible, more cautious, less daring. He was betting on another project that was in Famara on perforations in the massif to obtain water," recalled Díaz Rijo.
Faced with the lack of public funding, the engineer created the company Termolanza. The company had a capital of 50 million pesetas, with which it built a first distribution network that covered Arrecife. In addition, Díaz Rijo managed to get "the Americans to finance the part of the installation of the water purification plant", while he "improved the electrical network" of the island, he recalled. "We even inaugurated the first public lighting in Lanzarote, in Yaiza, when the island was in darkness," he added.
Manuel Díaz Rijo was still excited in 2011, almost four decades later, when remembering the moment when an American ship arrived with the pieces of the water purification plant. "This occurred in early 1962. Everyone was in the port, it was like a big party, a great novelty. Even the civil governor came. And the ship was delayed more than a day and a half. People looked at me with disbelief. I don't think they believed me, they thought that ship would never arrive." But it arrived, and the machines were installed in Punta Grande. Thus, while the plant was being assembled, the distribution network was being built towards Arrecife, which later reached the entire island. Already in the spring of 1965, Díaz Rijo's company informed "loudly" the citizens of Arrecife that "they could now open the taps". "I demonstrated something very important; and that is that the sea is a very large reservoir for obtaining water. We cannot give up the fact that water is a source of our supply", said the then town crier.