The Ribadelago rift: hydraulic modernity, industrial cinema and environmental memory in Francoist Spain

This article examines the cultural production of hydraulic modernity in Francoist Spain through a tragic event: the collapse of the Vega de Tera dam in 1959, which caused the flooding of the town of Ribadelago and claimed the lives of 144 people. Drawing on cultural studies, environmental history and energy humanities, this article explores how hydroelectric development was mediated through technoscientific institutions, visual culture and state-sponsored imaginaries of modernization. The article focuses on the documentary Carta de Sanabria (1955), produced for the hydroelectric company Hidroeléctrica de Moncabril shortly before the collapse of the dam. Rather than treating the film as a straightforward example of corporate propaganda, it approaches it as a contradictory cultural artifact situated between industrial cinema, ethnographic documentation and neorealist critique. Through its representations of rural poverty, labor and landscape, the documentary reveals tensions within the developmentalist discourse that sought to legitimize the transformation of nature under Francoism. Revisiting the Ribadelago disaster and its subsequent cultural memory, the article argues that the catastrophe exposed the fractures concealed beneath official narratives of modernization and contributed to the emergence of alternative understandings of territory, landscape and environmental justice. By placing industrial cinema, infrastructural development and environmental memory in dialogue, the article reconstructs a cultural genealogy of popular environmentalism in late-Francoist Spain and reflects on the continuing afterlives of hydraulic imaginaries in contemporary debates over ecological transition, territorial sovereignty and climate politics.