Destroyed crops, riverbed cyclists and a ‘Rock of Starvation’: how drought has devastated the Danube

 

Kürti rode for 30km along newly-exposed beds of the Danube

 

 

by Lorenzo Tondo in Hungary. Photographs by David Levene

 The Guardian travelled 100 miles along the EU’s longest river, where some residents are struggling to secure drinking water

 

For centuries, the rock was seen as a warning. When it began to emerge from the Danube, beneath Gellért Hill in Budapest, it meant the river had fallen so low that floating mills could no longer operate, crops were probably failing, and hunger would almost certainly follow. That is why, in the Hungarian capital, where over time the boulder became little more than a legend, it was named Ínség-szikla – the Rock of Starvation.

Today, amid record-low water levels on the Danube, the rock has not only emerged from the water, but surfaced almost in its entirety, along with the sandy riverbed on which it rests, astonishing geologists and government scientists sent to examine it. And, much as the rock was said to warn, Hungary is now facing an unprecedented energy crisis that has forced the country to shut down all but one of its Danube-cooled nuclear reactors for the first time in 44 years.

The Guardian travelled for more than 100 miles (160km) along the banks of the Danube, the EU’s longest river, which sustains the 10 countries it crosses, visiting villages and towns where residents are struggling to secure drinking water and farmers are fighting to keep their crops alive.

 

Pócsmegyer

Last week, the Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, warned that the economic damage caused by this year’s drought was expected to surpass that of the historic dry spell that devastated Hungary’s farmland in 2022.

István Somogyi has lost nearly 50% of his harvest this year

 While the full extent of the losses is still difficult to assess, István Somogyi, a 56-year-old farmer from Pócsmegyer, a village on the Danube, in Pest County, has already done his calculations.

 

“I’ve lost nearly 50% of my harvest this year and it could go up to 70%,” he said. “It’s gone. Everything has dried up. Since I started farming this land after the end of communist rule, I’ve never seen a catastrophe like this.”

Somogyi said the unprecedented crisis did not come out of nowhere, and that the heatwaves and droughts of previous years had already offered a warning. Scientists say that human-caused climate breakdown is making every heatwave in the world more intense and more likely to happen.

“You could see this coming,” he said. “The harvest was already poor last year. But we were lucky because the Danube stayed high. Despite the intense heat, there was still enough water in the soil. This time, there is no hope of saving our crops.”

On the near-deserted roads running alongside the river, families with children sought relief in the Danube’s shallow waters, while, not far away, military water tankers were siphoning water from rural wells, hauling vital supplies to the storage pools that feed the local grid.

 

Szentendre

Low water levels in the Danube at Szentendre

 Across the river from Pócsmegyer, on the opposite bank of the Danube, lies Szentendre, a town known for its community of artists. During the most intense days of the heatwave, some evening performances have been held by candlelight in an effort to reduce electricity consumption.

Aerial view of a long boat filled with people in shallow water

 Here, in recent weeks, vast, desert-like islands have emerged. The exposed riverbed is cracked like a mosaic of hard, dry clay, baked by suffocating heat that has pushed temperatures in Budapest close to 42C, with overnight temperatures hitting a high of 28C. Europe is warming faster than any other continent, with intense summer heat and prolonged drought being amplified by the deepening human-caused climate crisis. Extreme conditions continue to fuel wildfires and strain water supplies.

József Gulyás stands in front of stocks of bottled water being kept at the town hall in case of supply shortages
 

In some stretches of the Danube near Szentendre, it is now possible to walk through it with the water barely reaching above your ankles.

“Swimming and navigation are banned here,” said László Balázs, 44, head of the local river rescue service. “But people escaping the heat still enter the water, unaware it can suddenly drop into deep pools where they risk drowning.”

At the end of June, Budapest police (BRFK) said three people had gone missing in the Danube over a single weekend. Water police later recovered one body near Iváncsa, while searches continued downstream for the other two missing swimmers.

The drought and resulting disruption to energy supplies have also left some Hungarian towns struggling with shortages of drinking water. In a room inside Szentendre’s tourist information office, thousands of bottles of water are stored ready to be distributed, particularly to elderly and vulnerable residents.

 “About 4,000 to 5,000 households were left without water,” said József Gulyás, 62, Szentendre’s deputy mayor. “We distributed 25 tonnes of water and received about 100 emergency calls a day. We had never experienced anything so serious. Elderly women would hug the officers delivering water and burst into tears.”

 

Budapest

A geologist takes advantage of the low water levels to view the ‘Rock of Starvation’

 Driving from north to south, towards the Hungarian capital, Budapest, where the level of the Danube under normal conditions reaches an average height of 2 to 3 metres, and can rise as high as 8 metres, intense summer heat and continuing drought conditions caused the river to fall to a record low of just 14-19 cm on 4 August.

 

The water levels have fallen so dramatically that, as the Danube has retreated, it has revealed a succession of relics long hidden beneath its waters, including the remains of a woolly mammoth, a bridge destroyed after the second world war in Budapest, a Nazi warship and an unexploded British bomb.

Tourists and passersby look down over the side of the Liberty bridge in Budapest. The remains of an older bridge can be seen the shallow waters below.

 The water is so low in the capital that on 28 July, at about 4.30pm, Gábor Kürti, president of the Magyar Kerékpárosklub (Hungarian cyclists’ club) and owner of a cargo bike company, left his office in central Budapest, jumped on his bicycle and, in an unprecedented feat, rode for 30km along the exposed bed of the Danube, with his journey quickly going viral on social media.

 

“I wanted to show that if you can cycle along the bed of the Danube for 30km, it means that, because of this climate emergency, we have literally hit rock bottom,” he told the Guardian.

Riding his KTM X-Strada 20 gravel bike, Kürti set off from the mouth of the Szilas stream (Szilas-patak) and made his way across fine gravel, large pebbles, hard-packed sand and mud, eventually reaching the ferry terminal at Vác about three hours later.

“For many people it was an extraordinary adventure. For me, it was heartbreaking,” he said. “Cycling through parts of the river where, as a child, I used to swim or go kayaking, and which I could now cross on a bicycle, filled me with an indescribable sadness. It was like looking at the scene of a terrible accident. Throughout that journey, the scale of the catastrophe was unfolding before my eyes.”

 

Nagytétény

The Kis-Háros-sziget island nature reserve is usually only accessible by boat but is now reachable by foot, as low water levels in the Danube have exposed the river bed connecting the island to the mainland

 

Kürti took the Guardian into what, until only a few months ago, was the striking floodplain forest in Nagytétény named Kis-Háros-sziget, a protected area home to climbing plants, wild vines and several families of European beavers.

The river is reached by walking across ground that would normally lie several metres beneath the water. Here, one branch of the Danube has receded so dramatically that it came to an abrupt halt, blocked by an exposed riverbed left behind by the drought.

Its dry, clay-like surface looks like an image from a future shaped by the escalating human-caused climate crisis. Yet this is happening now. Passersby walk across what was once the river, their feet sinking into patches of mud. Kayakers struggle to make their way through the remaining shallow channels; many eventually give up, lift their kayaks on to their shoulders and walk home.

Hungarian authorities have been pumping water into large areas of the country’s nature reserves such as the one in Nagytétény, to keep marshlands from drying out as the drought intensifies.

 

Paks

Hungary’s only nuclear power station, in Paks near to the banks of the river Danube

 Continuing south, the road finally reaches Paks, home to Hungary’s nuclear power plant, its towers rising above the horizon. Here, municipal workers have been working weekends to keep more than 700 threatened trees alive and water the town’s flowerbeds.

 

Szilvia Farkas: ‘I have never seen so much vegetation dry out in all my years doing this job.’

 

“I’ve been doing this job for 18 years,” said Szilvia Farkas, 39, who is employed by Dunakom Zrt in Paks, owned entirely by the municipality, to plant and water trees and plants. “I have never seen so much vegetation dry out in all my years doing this job, and I have never worked as hard as I have this year to try to keep it alive.”

Dunakom Zrt uses its own drilled well for water extraction. In addition, the company is able to extract water from a decantation basin. The public is not permitted to use tap water for irrigation at the moment; instead, residents collect greywater and use it to water their gardens.

In the country’s more marginalised and deprived areas, the water crisis has compounded longstanding problems for thousands of people who were already living in difficult conditions before the drought, struggling with inadequate access to running water and sewage systems.

Géza Orsós Renáta, 43, who lives with her four children in a small farmhouse on the outskirts of Paks, has never had access to running water. Orsós, who also works for Dunakom Zrt, helping to water public green spaces drying out in the heat, has long relied on water from a neighbour.

Géza Orsós Renáta is helping to water public green spaces drying out in the heat

 

“Even in winter, we have to pump water and heat it in large bowls so we can wash,” she said. “Now a friend brings us water once a week. But it is becoming unbearable.”

Driving back from Paks, tall, swollen clouds occasionally gather on the horizon in the clear skies above Budapest, appearing to promise the return of rain, only to fade by evening, dashing the hopes of an entire country.

For now, people can do little but cling to the hope that the Rock of Starvation will disappear once more beneath the currents of the Danube, returning to the depths of the river and becoming little more than a legend again.

But Somogyi, who grew up hearing the story of the boulder passed down through generations, and who is now witnessing the consequences of the warning it was said to foretell, knows it will not.

“The drought will return next year,” he said. “That is the trend. And there isn’t much that we can do.”

  Zsuzsa Borbély contributed to this report

Tensions are rising between states that rely on the Colorado River. A prolonged drought means the nation’s largest reservoirs are dwindling, and litigation over access to water could lie ahead.

 

(Nina Riggio | The New York Times) The Upper Colorado River in Grand Canyon National Park in Colorado on May 16, 2026. About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation.

 

 By  Scott Dance | The New York Times

 

Boulder, Colo. • Water in the Colorado River is dwindling to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, and the seven states whose residents and farmers depend on the river can’t agree on a fair way to divide up what’s left.

Negotiations are going nowhere despite more than six months of ongoing talks, plus cajoling by the Trump administration, which twice gathered governors in hopes of a breakthrough that never came. States are already sniping at aspects of a water-use plan the federal Bureau of Reclamation is set to unveil this summer and impose later this year, and they’re threatening to sue each other over water deliveries, raising the prospects of prolonged legal battles just as Western states face demands to sharply reduce water use.

The river’s system of reservoirs and canals was designed for the climate and population of a century ago. It has strained to adapt to a declining water supply and enormous growth in communities in the river basin, despite improvements in efficiency that mean even booming cities are using less water than in the past. Water rights that may date back to the arrival of European settlers also complicate matters. And a year of extreme drought is making it even harder to decide how much each state can draw from the Colorado.

 

It is not for lack of effort.

“We have invested time, effort and money in trying to facilitate a multistate agreement,” Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said in an interview this month, moments after signing a deal that could one day augment the basin’s supply using desalinated water from a plant in Carlsbad, California.

But a day later, Cameron told a conference of water experts in Boulder, Colorado, that states have repeatedly rejected proposals for compromise. He said he doesn’t expect any state to be pleased with the measures the federal government is expected to take to delay or prevent reservoirs from dropping to critical lows in the short term.

“I think we’ve succeeded in making everyone unhappy, and maybe making everyone mad,” he said.

 About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.

 

But the states have been unable to agree upon water cuts that would reflect the new reality.

In the river’s lower basin — which includes growing urban areas in California, Arizona and Nevada, vast agricultural operations and the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead — communities have agreed to significant reductions in recent years. A new proposal that the states are asking the federal government to consider would curtail use even more, but the lower basin states and tribal nations have asked upstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to cut back, too.

 

But any time winter snowpack in the river’s headwaters is meager, the upper basin is forced to use less water, so those states have resisted committing to permanent annual water use cuts. While a 1922 compact divides the United States’ share of the river’s flow equally between the two basins, the less-populated upper basin consumes significantly less water each year than the lower basin.

The stalemate between the basins has deepened as the stakes rise. An existing water-use plan expired this winter, and the states missed key deadlines to agree on a new one, which must be in place by October to avoid chaos and confusion in water deliveries.

(Chet Strange | The New York Times) The shrinking Dillon Reservoir in Frisco, Colo., on May 18, 2026. The reservoir will remain closed this year because of low water levels after a worryingly dry winter. 

A mild winter and extreme spring heat left winter snowpack so depleted that Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, which straddles the upper and lower basins, risked falling below levels critical for hydropower until federal officials began emergency actions to shift water around and keep dams generating electricity.

So far, Trump administration officials have resisted imposing any plan unilaterally, though Cameron said the bureau had “not been passive.” It has offered $454 million for water conservation projects across the basin, using money left over from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed under President Joe Biden and included $4 billion for drought response in the West. Cameron said less than $100 million is left to help pay for more water savings.

“We have floated, three times, solutions that we thought represented something that the seven states could agree on,” Cameron said. “Turns out we were wrong.”

 

With the states unable to agree, the federal government is set to put new guidelines in place. Cameron said he expects Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department includes the Reclamation Bureau, to release a plan in July to govern use of the river for the next decade. Before that plan becomes final, it would need approval from a White House that has so far not gotten very involved in Western water issues.

A draft plan released in January included a range of options, some of which would make significant cuts across the lower basin, where the federal government’s control of reservoirs gives it more power to cut off flows. The alternatives would force water shortages, mostly in the lower basin, based upon reservoir conditions. They include varying levels of cutbacks that would leave some risks of unplanned emergency water shortages in the lower basin.

Arizona is especially vulnerable because of its heavy reliance on the reservoirs and its relatively junior water rights.

The federal plan would include room for tweaks and negotiations every two years, Cameron said. But state officials from across the region said that could make things worse.

The biggest problem is that reopening the whole plan every two years would undermine any certainty over water supplies, which is a key goal of the talks, said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top water negotiator.

 

“The constant renegotiation every two years is difficult to fathom,” Mitchell said, adding she believed it could create even more tension between the states. John Entsminger, Nevada’s negotiator, agreed it was “not a good plan.”

But Cameron said it was the best option given how difficult it has been to craft a longer-term deal.

As the talks stall, the threat of litigation is looming larger, even though negotiators have said they are hoping to avoid court battles that would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive and unpredictable. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, warned Wednesday on Capitol Hill that he would seek to block federal drought relief funds from any states that sue over Colorado River water.

In Arizona and Colorado, state officials have been readying lawyers and setting aside public funds for a legal fight over water. Earlier this year, television ads paid for by a coalition of Arizona water users warned that the state is “being targeted” with crippling cuts. Officials in both states said litigation was a real possibility.

In public comments submitted in response to the federal proposal, the states have hinted at contradictory legal interpretations of the 1922 compact, offering dueling arguments that both suggest that the Trump administration was at risk of violating that document. In dispute is whether the compact requires upper basin states to deliver a set amount of water downstream, regardless of conditions, or if the compact simply bars those upstream states from using more than they are officially allotted.

 

Arizona officials said the federal plan would “improperly prioritize maintaining Lake Powell elevations at the expense of required downstream releases,” and thus reduce the flows the state says it’s owed. Colorado said the plan “fails to impose adequate shortages in the Lower Basin to protect the system” and could unlawfully draw from upper basin reservoirs to stabilize Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Focusing on legal arguments could keep the states from reaching a compromise, Mitchell said. But Arizona’s top water official, Tom Buschatzke, said litigation was “still very much in play.” State lawmakers tripled the size of a fund for river-related litigation when it included $6 million for that purpose in a budget sent Thursday for approval by Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who has stressed Arizona’s need to protect its water supply.

Because the 1922 agreement is only about 1,700 words long, Entsminger suggested that the states might never agree on what exactly each of them is entitled to — and that was all the more reason for them to find common ground without resorting to litigation.

“The only way you’re ever going to have any certainty on that is probably the Supreme Court action,” Entsminger said. “The way you avoid that is a seven-state agreement.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.