Hands numbed by cold, feet frozen and cursing.

We have an aljibe in our house. An aljibe is a sort of water cistern. Ours is about two metres deep so I suppose it's capacity is a bit under 9,000 gallons or 40 cubic metres. It collects the water from the roof gutters on our house. In the past these cisterns, and wells, were the water supply for country houses. Nowadays, we have mains water but the aljibe was useful for summer garden watering. Unfortunately the aljibe started to leak; it would only hold about 15cms of water. The rest went somewhere else. We suspected that the somewhere else was the source of the damp patch on one of our walls. Spanish houses, often damp proof course less, are prone to rising damp but we did think we should put up, at least, a token resistance.

A builder told us it was tree roots punching through the concrete to get to the water. A temporary fix was possible but the roots would be back. We tried and he was right. Someone else told us that fixing aljibes was a specialist job and with the falling demand and the way that older people retire and die there were none of those specialists still working. They suggested we sealed off the cistern.

In the end my solution was very Heath Robinson. I stopped the downpipes feeding into the aljibe and put plastic dustbins to collect the rainwater. I pumped all of the water I could from the aljibe and then bought a dirty water pump that automatically activates with rising water level and put it in one of the dustbins. There are two dustbins and only one pump so if the rain is heavy I have to go and get soaked as I move the pump from one bin to the other. The set up is not at all elegant but we reckoned that if the aljibe were the source of the damp patch that was the lesser of two evils.

We had a hailstorm the other day. The hail was so thick it looked like snow. Then it froze into a sheet of ice. As I passed the dustbins I realised they were full and brimming over. Slip sliding across the ice sheet I tried to get the pump working. It didn't want to. I had to read the manual to fix the problem. My hands were frozen, my feet were wet and numb. I expected to break my neck on the ice sheet. Eventually I pumped out the bins but I could hear water running into the aljibe. I opened the hatch and we were back to the 15cms of water. Enough had seeped in through the hinges on the hatch etc. More fighting with the pump, more icy cold water running onto my back from a dribbling roof gutter. It took ages but I emptied the cistern then I covered all the holes and seepage points. Black plastic sheeting held down with rocks added to the ugliness of the dustbin, trailing hose, water pump and dustbin setup.

I don't think it's a win. I suspect that aljibe has been collecting water for hundreds of years and it will find a way to maintain that tradition!

On our cistern

When I was a schoolboy I was told how the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans were responsible for lots of English place names; things like  -thorpe from the Norse for a village, as in Mablethorpe, and  -ham is from the Saxon for the same thing, as in Birmingham.

In 711AD North Africans invaded what is now Spain and they controlled at least part of the peninsula for the next 700 plus years. Obviously enough, during that time, they made their mark on the land and its people. In the Spanish language lots of words begin with "a" or "al". That's because the Arabic for "the" is "a" or "al".  Over times  the sound sort of fused - like the old advert,  Drinka Pinta Milka Day, or how, when I've finished this, I'll get a cuppa. If you know Spanish you'll be able to think of myriad words that begin in "a" like azúcar, almohada, albahaca or almirante. If you don't know Spanish think of some of the place names that you know like Almeria, Andalusia, Alhambra (like the theatre in Bradford). No?, alright then, think Alicante airport (ألَلَقَنْت or Al-Laqant).

We have one of those words in our back patio, we have an aljibe. An aljibe is a construction to hold water, a cistern. I suppose that at one time in the past it would have been the main source of drinking water for the house. This is not a well, it's a structure that collects rainwater, like a water butt. It holds about 11,500 litres of water or around 2,500 gallons. The down drain pipes from the roof lead directly into the aljibe so, when it rains, we collect the water. We don't use it for drinking water, we use it to water the garden, and we raise the water with a pump rather than the more traditional pulley and bucket. It was only relatively recently that I realised that the shopping centre down in Elche, which is called L’Aljub, is simply aljibe written in the local Valenciano language rather than the more common Castilian Spanish.

Our aljibe started to leak. The bricky who came to have a look said that it was because tree roots homed in on the water and forced their way through the concrete. It was true, hanging with my head well inside the pit I could see the straggly roots. The bricky put me right when I called it an aljibe. "It's not an aljibe, it's a cistern," he said. I presumed he would know, being local and a builder and such, but I can't find any Internet source that agrees with him, nobody except José Miguel makes any distinction. For instance the translation of the Wikipedia article says of the etymology of the word: the term aljibe ("algibe") comes from the hispanic arabic, alǧúbb, algúbb, and this from the classic Arabic جب, gubb, which means cistern, well or pit.

I don't really mind what the name is but I do often think about the careful husbandry of water inherited from those North Africans as I'm watering the garden and I feel quite righteous in not using good clean drinking water for the job.