From river to river: at the place where the old and new channels of the Turia River branch, a route from the Molí del Sol weir to the Quart de Poblet footbridge over the Turia.
Hosted by Javier Ribera
The section of the old channel of the Turia River included between the Parque de Cabecera and the place where the bifurcation of the new channel occurs, is like an enclave, crossed by the boundaries of municipal areas (those of València, Mislata, Quart de Poblet and Paterna). A difficult territory to read. It seems like a zone of opportunities, for whoever can take them.
The old Turia channel, in the section between Parque de Cabecera and the point where it connects with the fork of the new Turia channel, is like no man’s land, in which planters removed from some public road in any of the surrounding towns in spontaneous landfills, under the sign “It is prohibited to throw debris”. In the background, the reconditioning work on the fields of a recently dismantled public service, in the riverbed protection zone.
Despite the feeling of abandoned territory that this first part of the route conveys, we find vestiges that tell us that it had a hydrological use. As evidenced by the encounter with the remains of the weir of the Rascaña irrigation canal. This weir was out of use when the new channel was built, at that time, a rearrangement of the irrigation ditches was carried out in the orchard affected by this large infrastructure, and a new weir was built, upstream, right at the point where that the bifurcation occurs. This is the Weir of the Repartiment.
The way in which mattress springs have been used in various closing elements of houses in the old channel of the Turia ―almost reaching the point where it connects with the fork of the new channel of the Turia, in the Weir of the Repartiment―, It denotes a use that is not merely utilitarian, but contains a design pretension, in the midst of a colonization phenomenon that does not express poverty, if anything, the traces of the underground economy are seen.
The place where the new channel of the Turia river forks takes place is a swarm of infrastructures of all kinds. In addition to the hydraulic infrastructure, the V-30 highway and the Ronda Nord CV-30 converge here, and for pedestrians, so that they can cross this heavily traversed but inaccessible territory, a modest wooden walkway has been built, but fulfills its function.
The Weir of the Repartiment. The waters of the Turia River reach here, here the flow is distributed among the network of irrigation ditches that irrigate the orchard, and, from here, the bed of the Turia River, both the old and the new, remain dry.
