Flooding prevention and control in rivers is a important topic in the river management. This is also the case in the basin of the river Ebro in Spain. In the past, the Ebro basin experienced several floods. In order to reduce the flood hazard in a given area, the local water administration usually sets up several flood-controlled areas for being able to store the excessive water volume during periods of extreme rainfall. In order to control the flows to and from the flooding zones, hydraulic control structures have been put in place. Through these actions, it is planned to have a significant reduction of the flood risk in the basin. Recent simulations of these past events in a hydrodynamic river model showed that flooding could have been significantly reduced and even avoided if the hydraulic structures would have been controlled in a different way. Therefore, the main interest of this paper is to test a different control strategy than the one currently adopted. Due to the specific nature of the flooding problem, a model predictive control (MPC) strategy (Maciejowski, 2001) seems to be the most suitable option. In this paper, the problem of flooding control at the Ebro River in Spain is addressed using MPC. Finally, several scenarios are used to validate the performance of the proposed approach. In Section 2, the problem addressed in this paper is described. In Section 3, a control oriented model is proposed. In Section 4, the control approach based on an MPC is described. Results of the application of the proposed control approach using a Virtual reality simulator are presented in Section 5. Finally, in Section 6, the main conclusions are presented.

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