Spain has more and more problems with the drought and criminal networks have begun to realize it

This story begins with a civil guard couple in civilian clothes chasing a tanker truck. They have been following trucks for months, they have checked thousands of livestock farms and, finally, they are about to find something.

With 50 million liters of something.

The initial track. More than a hundred residents of a district of Lorca denounced last year that there was an entire network selling water tanks to supply agricultural operations. It is nothing new: the Civil Guard has numerous investigations underway into the inspection and control of water use.

Therefore, SEPRONA started to investigate the matter.

And what have they found? The surveillance device located the tanker truck filling point: it was a well without authorizations for use and without a volumetric counter or any other type of measuring instrument. It seemed difficult to know the number of liters extracted.

However, as the company pretended to be legitimate, the Civil Guard has been able to document that, during the last 18 months, 56 million liters of water had been sold for a value of at least 275,000 euros.

This is only in the last 18 months: the armed institute believes that the illegal use of the well may have lasted several decades.

Just one case out of a million. Over the last few years We have been talking about dozens of people investigated, detained and convicted due to illegal irrigation: in 2023 alone, hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water have been extracted illegally. The problem is real: so real that the Malaga water company has even hired private detectives to monitor employees, suppliers and customers.

However, the key to this is not what has already happened. The key is what is going to happen.

The list of threats is enormous. Climate change, overexploitation of aquifers, intensive agriculture, inadequate water management, forest fires, deforestation and population growth… Spain has a problem with water and that problem is not going to stop growing and growing. In this context, robberies are going to become more frequent and common.

And that’s saying a lot: according to WWFthere are more than 500,000 illegal wells.

But no one can be surprised. After all, there is a high financial incentive and relatively low penalties. Most cases they end, in fact, in fines and that is an excellent breeding ground for a huge problem.

Image | VD Photography | Elentir

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