As climate extremes intensify across Europe, an ambitious new initiative led by the Horizon Europe SpongeWorks project is demonstrating how a mosaic of nature-based measures can restore the sponge function of landscapes—helping to retain water, protect soils, and enhance climate resilience at scale.
In Trikala, Greece, a new “Sponge Park” is being established as a flagship demonstration site: covering an area of 2 hectares, the park will feature a wide range of small-scale fully functioning implementation of sponge measures drawn from implementation sites across the project — including low tillage, mulching, terracing with water harvesting, buffer strips, hedges, and riparian forest planting.
Sponge measures are designed to restore and enhance natural hydrological processes, helping to retain water where it falls, reduce runoff, and preserve and regenerate soil and water systems. The Sponge Park will display in action a variety of measures, normally spread out across large landscapes and diverse European regions, in a user-friendly, well known and easily accessible location in Trikala, where experts, residents, and visitors can walk around and explore.
The area which will host the new “Sponge Park” in Trikala city (green space below-centre in the photo)
Demonstrating the SpongeWorks Vision on the Ground
The SpongeWorks project, funded under Horizon Europe and involving 28 partners across the continent, aims to prove that a network of decentralised, natural water retention measures—carefully adapted to local needs—can deliver real, measurable impact across entire river basins, at the landscape scale. By enhancing “sponge function”, the capacity to retain excess water and later release it slowly when needed, it aims to make decisive contribution to tackling some of Europe’s most pressing environmental threats: floods, droughts, soil infertility and erosion, and water scarcity.
The city of Trikala, a SpongeWorks partner known for its leadership in urban innovations, is playing a pioneering role in this vision. Located in the Thessaly region—an area hit hard by drought and recent catastrophic flooding—Trikala’s Sponge Park will act as a high-visibility demonstration park for urgently needed Nature-based Solutions that can be scaled across other vulnerable regions in Europe.
