Water in Canary Islands: Still affected by the 19th century disentailment

From Pascual Madoz in 1850 to the water mess in Tenerife in 2023: unlike in the Peninsula, groundwater was disentailed along with the land.

There are 1,800 kilometers between the Canary Islands and Madrid, the same number of kilometers of water tunnels in Tenerife. The island of Teide is a Gruyère cheese when it comes to water, but they are already 1,500 meters deep. Therefore, extracting it is expensive in terms of energy cost and its quality is questionable because, being trapped between so much rock, it has high levels of mineralization. In the Canary Islands, water is like oil: without water, there is no tourism, there is nothing. It is hardly advisable to use it directly from the tap and a good part of it is produced by desalination plants. On islands like Fuerteventura, in the past, the Navy used to bring water for the population in barges.

Since 1964, with more than 50 years of experience, all commercial desalination technologies have been installed in the Canary Islands. 319 desalination plants and a production capacity of over 660,000 cubic meters per day. In the Canary Islands, the water-energy binomial is as important as it is complex to manage, since producing desalinated water generates an energy dependence in the archipelago of around 10% of the energy put into the network, according to data from the Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias (ITC) of 2018. In Gran Canaria, 82% of the island's population is supplied with desalinated water. The Gran Canaria Water Council currently operates four reverse osmosis desalination plants with production capacities between 5,000 and 15,000 cubic meters per day. 9.5 cubic hectometers of desalinated water are produced with an energy consumption of 45.5 GWh/year, which in annual energy billing represents 4.8 million euros with a high environmental cost of brine discharge, the salt that is removed from the water.

In certain areas, different types of water are mixed to generate an increase in their profitability. While OPEC has a registry to know about the small sensors connected to the drills that perforate the rocky ground, in the case of water in the Canary Islands, it is opaque and even violent at the institutional level. When asked if there is a registry of desalinated water membranes and expiration dates, the answer is no. Each desalination plant is supervised, but an analysis of water quality by municipality generates contradictions about what people use to prepare a watercress stew, a traditional dish typical of the islands, at home. The competencies there are of Public Health, that is, of Health. Therefore, it is a very sensitive sector in terms of promoting tourism and food safety for the population.

Such is the importance of water that if in Saudi Arabia there is a Ministry of Oil, in the Canary Islands there is a Water Council. Its head, Manuel Miranda, from Coalición Canaria, warns that the problem of the islands with water is serious due to "a complete inaction during the last 4 years". The non-compliance with the agreement has serious consequences for the Canary Islands, since the archipelago is a region with scarce water resources and the planned hydraulic works are necessary to guarantee the water supply to the population, as well as its economic development. The delay in the execution of these works is causing serious supply problems in some islands -especially in Fuerteventura, Lanzarote and El Hierro-, as well as an increase in the production costs of drinking water. This agreement allows the Government of the Canary Islands, and the central government, to collaborate in water matters of supply, industrial water production -desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants-, actions related to irrigation systems, those related to current infringement procedures, transport, storage, groundwater abstraction, among others.

The island authorities have taken action. The Cabildo de Tenerife will promote hydraulic works to guarantee the supply of quality water to all sectors and definitively end the discharges. The president of the Cabildo, Rosa Dávila, in the General Board of the Water Council of Tenerife, an autonomous body attached to the Island Corporation, said that with the new mandate "we are facing a double challenge". "Water is the engine of our island and we renew that commitment with the water of Tenerife", she adds. We want more water, of higher quality and at the lowest possible cost. There are many challenges ahead and from the Water Council we will face them with energy and determination and we will be able to take steps forward. We hope for enough dialogue and consensus to be able to work calmly", says Dávila, who has appointed Blanca Pérez, head of Natural Environment, to regulate the sector and update it.

Pascual Madoz in 1850 that the beautiful things he said about the Canary Islands in the 11,688 pages of his Geographical-Statistical-Historical Dictionary of Spain and its Overseas Possessions (1846-1850), scattered concepts throughout the 16 volumes of the work, that his disentailment would cause a mess in 2023 for the Canarian residents regarding water. In the Canary Islands, water is private because its ownership followed the same path as land. After 1855, land and water seized from the Church were auctioned off. The Water Law of 1866 led to the effective de-patrimonialization of water, whose effective ownership had belonged to the Crown, and therefore now belonged to the private sector that participated in the auction, recalls Mario Marrero Hernández, professor of Geography and History at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife. The question of whether Madoz is to blame for the current water problems in the Canary Islands is a complex one. On the one hand, his disentailment policies led to the privatization of water resources. On the other hand, the Water Law of 1866 and other factors also contributed to the current situation. Ultimately, it is up to the Canarian people to find a solution to the water problems in their region. They may need to consider reforms to the water law, investments in water conservation and infrastructure, and changes to water use practices.