In the Drought Cities, the Fountain Becomes a Stage

SEVILLE — The great baroque fountain in the old plaza has not run since spring, its basin swept dry by municipal order, and this week it filled anyway — with people. Each evening after the heat breaks, neighbors gather in the empty stone bowl for what began as a joke and hardened into a ritual: a fiddler, a circle of chairs, children chalking blue waves across the parched marble. "If the water will not come, we will," said Lucia Marin, seventy-one, who has lived on the plaza her whole life and remembers when the jets ran all summer. The gatherings have spread to dry fountains in Naples and Athens, coordinated by nothing but word of mouth and the same falling reservoirs the Concordat is debating a continent away. Sociologist Nadia Farouk calls it grief made social — a way to mourn the water in company rather than alone at a shut tap. It solves nothing. It also, Marin said, means she is not thirsty by herself.