Lastras de Cuéllar, the city in Spain where drinking water is a mirage

“I brush my teeth with bottled water”, sighs Francisca Benítez, a 76-year-old woman who enjoys the shade of Lastras de Cuéllar café, a city deprived of drinking water less than two hours from Madrid, in the heart of Spain.

In Spain, where the quality of the water can be seen threatened by agricultural pollution, the lack of controls and the drought, several dozen municipalities, in addition to Lastras, suffer from the same problem.

In this town of Castilla y León (center), nitrates and arsenic make water unsafe for its inhabitants350 in winter and about a thousand in summer.

So every Monday they parade in the main square to collect water bottles subsidized by the town hall, which will be carried in arms or in wheelbarrows.

Among them Alejandro Martín, 17, who help his 95 year old grandfather to find the precious water he uses to make coffee.

Outside, garlands made from plastic bottles hang from balconies with posters showing demand access to drinking water.

“This is not normal in the 21st century”Mercedes Rodríguez, 41, is irritated.

Investments

Mayor Andrés García denounces his side public “lack of money” which delayed a project that should provide drinking water by the end of the year.

Only in Castile and León, 63 communities were deprived of water drinkable in March, according to regional television. At the national level, there are no official figures.

According to the Ministry of Health, 67,050 analyzes carried out in 2019 at the national level – sometimes in the same place on different dates – they have shown that the water is not drinkable.

Yes nitrate levels are worrisome since more than a quarter (28%) of the country’s underground water stations have a concentration close to or above the potability threshold and nearly a quarter (22%) is “vulnerable” to this pollution due to nature soil or agricultural activities, according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition.

The agricultural pollution is increasingly observed. As in Lierta, in the region of Aragon (northeast), without drinking water since 2018 because of nitrates and where the inhabitants are fighting against a project to install a farm of 3,000 pigs.

Cattle

Under a blazing sun only a dog drinks from a fountain teeming with algae greener than the surrounding mountains, towering over a vast expanse of golden grain fields dotted with pigsties.

here is “20,000 pigs for about fifty inhabitants”, complains Bernard Más, 68, member of a residents’ association which has just managed to suspend the project for a year during the last city council.

In the country where pork is highly valued, “intensive breeding, macro-farms they are a problem“for the quality of the water in the areas where they are located, due to manure,” said Luis Babiano, president of the Spanish Association of Public Water Supply and Sanitation Operators.

But the excess of nitrates in water sources continues to be above all a “consequence of the use of fertilizers in agricultural activity”, which constitutes “the main problem” on the ground, underlined a report from the Ministry of Ecological Transition at the end of 2020.

“In rural areas there is not enough water control and the inhabitants of small population centers could drink unsanitary water without knowing it, ”warns the same report.

A situation that worries even in Brussels, where the European Commission issued an ultimatum to Spain in 2020 improve its water quality control, under penalty of heavy fines.

Likewise, the drought, which could worsen in Spain for climate change, threatens to compromise water quality.

Because if the amount of water decreases and the amount of harmful products does not decrease, thethe proportion of the latter increases, explains Luis Babiano.

In Lastras, Mercedes Rodríguez fears that water problems lead the people “to extinction”Because “who is going to come and live in a city that cannot drink tap water?

AFP Agency

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