First victory of water warriors in Coín

The organisation Mesa de Agua, which has been campaigning against the project to build the enormous proposed leisure park on the outskirts of Coín in the Guadalhorce Valley with a watersports complex, is celebrating a victory today.

Through fear of the already near-exhausted aquifer being completely overexploited by the project and leaving families and smallholders without water for themselves, the campaign has fought hard over the last two years to protect their water with banners reading ‘no con mi agua’ and following legal channels to halt the misuse of water in the already drought-stricken zone.

On Friday, April 11, the Junta de Andalucía ruled that the Transcendence project does not have sufficient water to carry out its project and therefore will not concede water from the municipality to be used for leisure in the area. Five technicians from the Junta have given a resounding ‘no’ to conceding water to the plan on the land it has been designed to go.

The report, due to be published shortly, states that the regional government does not contemplate the project in the present nor the next couple of years giving permission to be carried out. It states that it also accepts that the zone is exceptionally vulnerable to contamination due to the permeability of the zone.

Mesa de Agua says that there is not enough water for the population and that the Transcendence project wants to extract 200,000 cubic metres more. They are not completely out of the woods yet and urge people join their campaign.