A week ago, the Consorci d'Aigües Costa Brava announced that it would invest 4.5 million euros in a shock plan to increase the available drinking water before this summer. The main investment was the creation of a battery of wells around the Muga River as an emergency collection system in which 2.6 million were going to be allocated.
A measure that has raised blisters in several sectors. If a few days ago it was the farmers who warned of the risk of salinization of the Fluvià-Muga aquifer that this action could entail, today it was the environmental entities IAEDEN-Salvem l'Empordà who have also shown their rejection of the idea launched a week ago by the Girona Provincial Council to recover old wells in the lower part of the aquifer and open new ones.
Conservation entities agree with the agricultural sector on several points. They consider that the commissioning of these wells will cause a "dangerous increase in salinization in an aquifer that is already very damaged." They also agree in saying that "to save a summer tourist season we cannot further damage this aquifer."
Environmentalists ask to "stop" the urban growth model and tourism model considering that it requires "a high demand for water." Given this situation, they demand a review of urban planning, especially in the municipalities of the Costa Brava "to update" their POUMs to the context of the climate emergency.
In this sense, they demand the cancellation of plans for second homes and tourist constructions that they claim have a "strong impact" on the territory and are "unsustainable" with water resources.
They also raise the need to provide agriculture in the region with aid to improve the efficiency of water use, measures to make a transition towards crops with less water needs and the reduction of the pig herd.
They say that the more than 400,000 heads of pigs that the Alt Empordà region registered in 2023 represent water consumption that the Muga River basin cannot assume and nitrate contamination of the aquifers of many towns in the region.
Environmental entities suggest a change in the water governance model in the Muga River basin and that the solutions proposed by the administrations are not short-term, but medium and long-term.
"Until now the demand for water has set the pace of exploitation of the country's water system, this must end. It is the availability of water that must set the uses," they say in a statement.
