Málaga and Almería want a ‘water motorway’ to connect their watershed with the Rules reservoir.

The reservoir and dam at Rules (Granada) was completed in 2003 but since then no work has started to channel the resources to the coast. Farmers and irrigators have been waiting since then for some progress.

Rules reservoir - archive photo

Then this summer, the cat was set amongst the pigeons when the PP member, Luisa García Chamorro, speaking to the press in Málaga, mentioned the idea of running pipes to transfer water from the Rules reservoir to the La Viñuela in the Axarquía.
This outraged the farmers and irrigators on the Costa Tropical (the Granada coastline) because those in Almuñécar and La Herradura are suffering a desperate situation because of a terrible drought. The Junta played down her remark but questioned ‘is there any possibility of water transfer between Málaga and Almería?’

The real situation noted by IDEAL (the Granada newspaper) which questioned the irrigators in the three provinces: Almería, Málaga and Granada – and they have been given no indication of any project from the Rules dam from the Junta. But there is an official petition from the irrigators in Almería and Málaga to interconnect their respective water courses to the Rules dam, taking advantage of the works shortly to begin, to serve the Granada coastline from Rules.

The irrigators from Almería and Málaga want therefore to convince the Junta and central Government to look ahead to the future and construct the ‘water motorway’ – allowing water to flow in both directions shared across the three provinces.
‘The irrigators on the Granada coastline must be the first to be connected to this water supply generated in Granada province. Granada needs an integral solution. But we recognise when there is a great deal of snow we can grant water to our neighbours, and that is the ideal solution’ explained José Antonio Fernández, president of the Almería Irrigators Federation. This collective is the most important in the province of Almería, with 20,000 member irrigators which cover an area of more than 60,000 hectares of agricultural land.

In the Axarquía there is a project planted by 67 irrigator communities in a platform which represents more than 10,000 farmers, and they suggest connection La Viñuela to other water sources in Granada or even in Iznájar (Córdoba).

The coordinator of the Water Platform of La Axarquía, Alejandro Clavero, has called on the irrigators in Granada to not see us an enemy and for the politicians to ‘keep calm’. ‘We are not taking about a water transfer, that is in the past, we don’t want to give you water, we want sufficient infrastructures to interconnect the reservoirs and then the water can be sent where needed’ he explained. ‘In the Axarquía there are sub-tropical fruits and they need plenty of water, and so we must guard the water supply to Almuñécar’ ‘What we want is to keep the extra water we have’ he sentenced.