A2 · Elementary
10 min
climatecultural heritageurban environmenteuropean politics
The City and the Sea: Venice and the Climate
La Ciudad y el Mar: Venecia y el Clima
The Venice Biennale opens in a city fighting a rising sea. Fletcher and Octavio go deep on Venice, climate change, and what the world stands to lose.
La Bienal de Venecia abre sus puertas en una ciudad que lucha contra el agua. Hablamos de Venecia, del clima y de lo que está en peligro.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| el mar | the sea | El mar está muy caliente este año. |
| el agua | the water | El agua sube en Venecia cada año. |
| hay que | one must / it is necessary to | Hay que cuidar el planeta. |
| el peligro | the danger | Venecia tiene un peligro grande con el agua. |
| antiguo | old / ancient | Venecia es una ciudad muy antigua. |
| la sequía | the drought | En el sur de España hay mucha sequía. |
| la barrera | the barrier | Italia tiene una barrera grande para el agua. |
| caliente | hot / warm | El Mediterráneo está muy caliente ahora. |
The image that stayed with me this week wasn't from a war zone or a parliament.
It was from an art show.
The Venice Biennale opened yesterday, the jury quit in protest, there were demonstrations outside the pavilions, and I kept thinking: this is happening in a city that might not exist in a hundred years.
Venecia es una ciudad especial.
Venice is a special city.
Está en el agua.
It sits on the water.
Right, it literally is.
And I want to get into that, because I think the politics at the Biennale, which are real and messy and worth discussing, actually distracted from something the Biennale's very location is telling us.
Octavio, how familiar are most Spaniards with Venice?
Muchos españoles visitan Venecia.
Many Spanish people visit Venice.
Es muy famosa.
It's very famous.
Famous is one word for it.
But here's what I think gets lost in the tourism brochure version of Venice: the city is in genuine, measurable, accelerating danger.
The sea is rising.
The city is sinking.
And both things are happening at the same time.
El agua sube en Venecia.
The water rises in Venice.
Esto es un problema grande.
This is a big problem.
Massive problem.
And it has a name in Italian that every visitor eventually learns: acqua alta, which just means high water.
But what sounds like a romantic inconvenience, tourists rolling up their trouser legs, that's actually a symptom of something that's been getting worse for decades.
La ciudad tiene muchos años.
The city is very old.
Es muy antigua.
It's ancient.
About fifteen hundred years old, depending on how you count.
And for most of that history, Venice managed its relationship with water brilliantly.
The whole city is built on wooden piles driven into the lagoon bed.
The Venetians were engineering geniuses.
But the system was designed for a sea level that no longer exists.
Antes el agua era diferente.
Before, the water was different.
Ahora el mar es más alto.
Now the sea is higher.
Exactly.
And the measurements are stark.
Venice has sunk roughly thirty centimeters over the twentieth century, partly from natural settling, partly from decades of pumping groundwater for industrial use on the mainland.
At the same time, sea levels in the northern Adriatic have risen by around twelve centimeters since 1900.
Those two trends together are brutal.
Italia tiene un plan.
Italy has a plan.
Hay una barrera grande.
There is a big barrier.
Yes, the MOSE project.
And this is where it gets genuinely interesting to me, because MOSE is both an engineering triumph and a cautionary tale at the same time.
The basic idea: seventy-eight giant hinged metal flap gates, installed at the three inlets where the Adriatic connects to the Venice Lagoon.
When a flood is predicted, they inflate with air, rise from the seafloor, and block the surge.
La barrera funciona.
The barrier works.
Venecia no tiene agua ahora.
Venice doesn't get flooded now.
It does function, mostly.
They activated it for the first time in 2020, and it has prevented several major floods since then.
But here's the thing.
MOSE took nearly sixty years from concept to operation.
It cost six billion euros.
And along the way it became one of the biggest corruption scandals in Italian history.
Mucho dinero desaparece.
A lot of money disappears.
La corrupción es un problema.
Corruption is a problem.
Enormous problem.
In 2014, Italian investigators arrested thirty-five people including the mayor of Venice at the time.
Prosecutors said over a hundred million euros in bribes had been paid over the life of the project.
So you have this situation where a city desperately needed climate infrastructure, and the money meant to save it was being quietly eaten.
El dinero es para la ciudad, no para las personas ricas.
The money is for the city, not for rich people.
That's it exactly.
And what makes Venice's situation so significant beyond Italy is that this problem, climate infrastructure that arrives late, costs too much, and gets tangled in politics and corruption, that's not unique to Venice.
That's a pattern you see everywhere.
La UNESCO dice que Venecia tiene peligro.
UNESCO says Venice is in danger.
Esto es serio.
This is serious.
It is serious.
UNESCO has actually threatened to add Venice to its list of World Heritage Sites in danger, which would be a massive embarrassment for Italy.
The warning was partly about climate, partly about the sheer number of tourists, which is a separate but related crisis.
At peak season, Venice gets ninety thousand visitors a day into a city of fifty thousand residents.
Los turistas son muchos.
There are many tourists.
La ciudad es pequeña.
The city is small.
Tiny, really.
And the local population has been falling for decades.
In 1950 there were about 170,000 people living in Venice proper.
Today it's under 50,000 and dropping.
Young people leave because rent is impossible, because the city is becoming a kind of living museum, and because when the water comes in, it's their homes that get damaged, not the hotels.
El agua daña las casas.
The water damages the houses.
La gente sale de la ciudad.
People leave the city.
And that human dimension is something I find gets lost in the climate conversation.
We talk about Venice as a landmark, as a jewel of Western civilization, which it is.
But there are real families there who have lived in the same buildings for four or five generations and are now watching their ground floors flood twice a winter.
España también tiene el mar.
Spain also has the sea.
El Mediterráneo es importante.
The Mediterranean is important.
Talk to me about that.
Because I know the Mediterranean has its own climate story, and it's not identical to the Adriatic.
El Mediterráneo tiene más calor ahora.
The Mediterranean is warmer now.
El agua está muy caliente.
The water is very hot.
Which is alarming, because the Mediterranean is actually one of the fastest-warming bodies of water on the planet.
It's warming roughly twenty percent faster than the global ocean average.
And a warmer Mediterranean means stronger storms, longer droughts in southern Europe, and real disruption to the ecosystems that the region's food supply depends on.
Los peces cambian de lugar.
The fish move to different places.
El mar cambia mucho.
The sea changes a lot.
That detail about the fish is something I keep reading about and finding genuinely striking.
Species that were never seen in the northern Mediterranean twenty years ago are now common.
Lionfish, pufferfish, bluespotted cornetfish.
These are fish from warmer, tropical waters.
Their presence is a direct signature of what's happening to the temperature.
En España, hay menos lluvia en el sur.
In Spain, there is less rain in the south.
Hay mucha sequía.
There is a lot of drought.
And that's the part I want to dwell on for a minute, because southern Spain is genuinely one of the places climate scientists point to as most vulnerable in Europe.
The provinces of Almería, Murcia, parts of Andalusia, these already have near-desert conditions, and the projections suggest they'll get drier, hotter, and more prone to what are called flash droughts, which arrive with almost no warning.
La gente necesita agua.
People need water.
Sin agua, no hay comida.
Without water, there is no food.
No food, no agriculture, no economy.
And this brings me back to Venice, because what Venice and a drought-stricken Almería have in common is that they're both showing us the same truth: climate change doesn't hit everywhere the same way.
It amplifies whatever vulnerability already exists.
Venice was always near the water.
The south of Spain was always dry.
Climate change just turns the dial up.
Hay que actuar rápido.
We have to act fast.
El tiempo es importante ahora.
Time is important now.
And the frustrating part is that we've known this for a long time.
The MOSE project was conceived in the 1980s.
The first serious scientific warnings about Venice and sea level rise came in the 1960s.
We had sixty years, and what we have to show for it is a system that finally works, sort of, that was built over the bones of a corruption scandal, and that scientists are already saying may be insufficient by 2100 if emissions stay high.
Muchas ciudades tienen agua cerca.
Many cities are near water.
Esto es un peligro.
This is a danger.
Think about what that list actually looks like: Miami, Amsterdam, Jakarta, Dhaka, Alexandria, Shanghai.
Cities with hundreds of millions of people between them.
And most of them don't have even the incomplete, scandal-plagued version of a MOSE system.
Venice, for all its problems, is actually ahead of most of the world in terms of having thought seriously about this.
El arte de la Bienal habla del clima también.
The Biennale art also talks about climate.
Muchos artistas trabajan con este tema.
Many artists work with this theme.
That's a fair point, and I'll admit I hadn't dug into the exhibition content as much as I should have.
The Biennale this year has a theme around what it calls 'the presence of the living,' which is very much tied to ecology, human relationships with nature, the planet.
So there's a real irony in the fact that the political fight over Russia and Israel's pavilions dominated the coverage, when the art itself was trying to say something about the world's survival.
La política es muy ruidosa.
Politics is very loud.
El clima es más importante.
Climate is more important.
That might be the sentence of the year, actually.
And I don't say that to dismiss the politics.
The questions about which countries should participate in international cultural events are legitimate.
But when the building is slowly going underwater, there's something almost absurd about standing outside arguing about the guest list.
Hay que cuidar el planeta.
We have to take care of the planet.
Es nuestra casa.
It is our home.
Actually, Octavio, that phrase you just used caught my ear.
'Hay que.' I've been hearing that a lot in Spanish and I keep noticing it works differently from how I'd say it in English.
What exactly is it doing?
'Hay que' significa 'es necesario'.
'Hay que' means 'it is necessary'.
No tiene sujeto.
It has no subject.
Es general.
It is general.
So it's impersonal.
Nobody in particular has to do the thing, everyone does.
In English we'd say 'you have to' or 'one must,' both of which sound either too casual or too Victorian.
'Hay que' just bypasses all that.
It lands clean.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Hay que comer.' 'Hay que dormir.' Es muy útil.
'Hay que comer' means you have to eat.
I like that it also takes the blame off anyone specifically.
Very useful in politics.
Or marriage.
I'm going to start using it and I give myself about forty-eight hours before I put the wrong verb after it and tell someone they have to be embarrassed about Venice.
Fletcher, 'embarazado' es 'pregnant'.
Fletcher, 'embarazado' means 'pregnant'.
No es 'embarrassed'.
Not 'embarrassed'.
I know, I know.
And yet somehow knowing that has never stopped me.
Hay que estudiar más, Octavio.
That's my sentence.
Thank you for Venice, thank you for the grammar lesson I didn't see coming, and thank you all for listening.