The Costa del Sol is preparing to face the year with the least water in history

Fuengirola will apply night-time water supply cuts from the third week of January, joining other large coastal towns such as Vélez-Málaga and Rincón del Victoria which are already applying the same measure and some 300,000 Malaga residents do not have water at night.

The Costa del Sol is beginning to suffer the effects of the worst drought in living memory in the province of Malaga. It is not ruled out that, over the next two months, more localities will be added which for decades have had the Concepción reservoir as their main source of supply. For the first time in its history, the overall level is below one hundred cubic hectometres stored in the seven reservoirs in Malaga as a whole.

Night time cuts

From this third week of January, Fuengirola will reduce the water pressure between midnight and 7am. This will mean that some 300,000 Malaga residents will suffer some kind of supply restriction during the night. These night-time cuts will affect, among others, two of the five most populated municipalities in the province.

The Town Hall of Fuengirola had already warned at Christmas that everything was ready for the company in charge of the supply, Gestagua, to implement, “a calendar of programmed interruptions in the supply”, in case it did not rain “immediately”.

The cuts will begin on Monday, January 15 in Fuengirola and the measure will be taken from Sunday to Friday, with the intention of allowing users to, “have a normal family life on Saturdays and to cause as little damage as possible to the hotel and catering sector”, according to the Town Hall.

Install storage tanks

The councillor for Infrastructures, José Sánchez, and the Gestagua delegate in Fuengirola, Enrique Sánchez, said that home owners and owners of commercial premises that do not have water tanks, or those properties located in the higher areas of the municipality, will experience cuts at night.

A recommendation to all users is to install such tanks or cisterns. And in the case of hotel and catering businesses, there is a regulation that requires them to have, “water reserve systems”, in order to be self-sufficient for a minimum of 24 hours.

The Concepción reservoir is about to have less hectometres than that of La Viñuela, considered since last spring as a “dead reservoir”.