Our guardian angel will help to
ensure that our son will be rescued.
2-year-old Julen died after falling into a 70
meter-deep borehole that had been drilled illegally.
The rescue attempt was
broadcast around the world.
The tragedy drew attention to an
increasingly serious problem in Spain —
widespread illegal
extraction of water.
What happened to Julen is tragic.
It shocked people.
It’s time to put a stop to the drilling of illegal
boreholes, which amounts to stealing a public asset.
It’s thought there are over a
million illegal boreholes in Spain,
often called moonshine wells
because they’re drilled at night.
They are used to help irrigate produce grown
here, in one of the driest corners of Europe,
and exported to the
rest of the continent.
No one wants to take responsibility. I
doubt anything will change, unfortunately.
Nature at its most idyllic. Doñana National Park,
south of Seville, is a UNESCO World Heritage site
and a stopover for millions of migratory
birds travelling between Europe and Africa.
But it’s surrounded by agricultural
activity that is sucking it dry.
Demand for water poses a threat
to this natural paradise,
and illegal wells are
exacerbating the problem.
Water is essential for biodiversity,
for the park’s wetlands and fauna.
It’s also essential for the local economy,
which revolves around intensive farming.
But the problem is: in the last thirty years, the
farming has led to illegal extraction of water.
And that has a serious impact on
the park’s marshes and lagoons.
Groundwater levels have fallen. So the water
balance in Doñana National Park has been altered.
We’re destroying it.
Felipe Fuentelsaz has been fighting to protect
Doñana National Park for sixteen years.
The agricultural engineer
comes from the region,
and has made the campaign against
illegal wells his life’s mission.
He uses satellite imaging to locate newly
drilled boreholes and illegal agriculture.
These are official government maps.
They show legal agricultural areas.
It’s a map that’s available to the
general public. So what do we do?
We and our experts look
for unauthorized farms.
We zoom in and identify areas
where crops are being cultivated.
This, this, this — all new. We pass our findings on
to the authorities and report the illegal zones.
When we identify anything
suspicious we go and check it out.
But the activist says the authorities offer little help
in the fight to protect the region’s natural environment
Reporting illegal wells and farms usually goes nowhere.
It’s deeply frustrating.
We can see that crops are being cultivated here,
this farm suddenly appeared about two years ago.
It’s right next to the road. But it’s not being
shut down even though everyone knows it’s here.
It’s been reported to
the water authority.
Illegal farming and authorities
that turn a blind eye.
Despite the fact there are clear
rules on irrigation practices —
laid out in a water management plan that farmers, NGOs
and local authorities spent seven years debating.
The Andalusian parliament approved
the plan in December 2014.
Illegal farming must be stopped.
We hope this happens.
These areas of cultivation have sprouted up over the
last thirty years and there was no local oversight.
Local councils simply allowed this
boom in illegal farming to happen.
Around Doñana National Park, water is used
mainly to irrigate strawberry plantations.
The region produces approximately one
third of strawberries grown in Europe.
Strawberry production is a
major source of employment.
Over 80,000 people earn a living in the sector,
including many smallholders and their families.
Local environmental activists who are against
the practice are often denounced as traitors.
This is an illegal borehole. There
are roughly 1,000 of them in Doñana.
These are especially egregious because
we’re in the middle of a protected forest.
But there 60 illegal wells here alone — extracting
water from rivers that belongs in the wetlands.
It’s shocking, because you can’t even see the fields.
They’re five, six, seven kilometers away.
They run lines from here to the farms, and often
they lay kilometers of electric cables too.
Right through the forest, without any
kind of permit or safety precautions.
There’s a high risk of forest fires. This has been
going on for ten years or so. It’s scandalous.
It’s tricky trying to follow the pipes because they
disappear into the ground, reappear, then disappear again.
This is an illegal reservoir.
In a wooded area.
It’s illegal; you can’t install a reservoir here.
Each of these pipes is a well.
And you can clearly see
that they’re in operation.
Water from about 14 wells in the vicinity is collected
here and pumped to farms that aren’t even close by.
This is one of the most flagrant examples of the kind
of illegal activity we’ve been fighting for years.
It’s high time we took a step forward
and put a stop to water theft.
A growing number of locals and the
European Commission are pushing for this.
The European Court of Justice
has opened proceedings against
the Spanish Government in connection
with water theft in Doñana.
Monocultures are by no means
restricted to Doñana National Park.
The agricultural sector’s insatiable thirst for
water is transforming the Andalusian landscape.
But a groundwater supply
is by no means guaranteed.
Drilling contractor Luis
Montenegro’s business is thriving.
A test drill costs around 2,000 euros. But
it’s a risky investment for his clients.
And there’s a long wait for a
permit from the water authority.
When a farmer submits a drilling
project to the authorities,
it can take up to eight or
nine months to get a reply.
That’s just unacceptable. The
water authority takes ages.
But farmers need to irrigate their crops.
If they can’t, they lose their harvests.
And then the familes and
farms end up ruined.
What often happens is, the farmers opt
not to pay for an approved drilling.
Because what happens
if no water is found?
There’s no well and the
borehole has to be refilled.
The upshot: farmers often drill
boreholes without official permits.
Along with the costs of drilling,
submitting an application
and commissioning the requisite geological
surveys can cost around 1,000 euros.
Here in central Andalusia, olive farmer Antonio’s
wife has even resorted to a divining rod.
They need water urgently. Their trees
are hard hit by climate change.
The dry season is getting
longer and longer.
If the trees get no water,
there will be no olives.
Obviously we have to use water before the official
permit comes through, that’s just how it is.
The drilling contractor is pessimistic. Tomorrow,
the company will try again at a different spot.
You can't see a thing. Just a black hole.
There's no water.
If there was, the
soil would be moist.
Here in the region, there's very little
water, it's the wrong sort of bedrock.
We extract a lot of water.
Groundwater levels are falling.
Everyone wants a private pool, the agricultural
sector’s demand for water is growing.
Here in southern Europe,
we depend on farming.
The farming sector helped the country
survive the most recent financial crisis.
During the financial crisis that left Spain reeling,
farming was indeed one of the few stable sectors.
But its growth is now reaching its limit. Felipe
Fuentelsaz from the World Wide Fund for Nature
wants to see the sector manage
water resources more sustainably.
We’re on our way to a citrus
fruit farm that we work with.
It’s the first farm in Europe to
be certified according to a system
that manages water
consumption sustainably.
Daily monitoring is absolutely essential.
It’s about respecting a commodity
that everyone wants to have —
water, which is in short supply.
This farm is proof positive that water
consumption can be realistically reduced.
Consumers have an
important role to play.
They decide which
product they buy.
They need to ask where the product comes from,
and if that’s somewhere with a water shortage.
That’s very important.
Supermarkets also decide where
they buy their produce from.
They can check whether it’s all sound,
that’s what the water authority map is for.
If everything’s
above board, great.
Felipe Fuentelsaz is here
to inspect a plantation.
Luis Bolaños is one of the first farmers who’s
working with a new water certification scheme.
He supplies a major German supermarket
chain with organic oranges.
His plantation is massive, producing
12,000 tons of oranges per year.
Water is saved with the
help of a sensor system.
It collects data on the air quality
and measures changes in the plants.
Crucially, sensors in the ground
control a drip irrigation system,
ensuring that the water is distributed around the
crops’ roots and doesn’t simply trickle away.
We maximize efficiency with a drip
irrigation system and sensors.
We don’t waste any water and
we add fertilizer to the water
which doesn’t seep into the groundwater
and contaminate it with nitrate.
That helps us a lot. It’s revolutionary. We use
20% less water, but the harvests are the same.
LUIS: Good morning, everyone.
CARMEN: Hello.
LUIS: How you
doing, Carmen?
CARMEN: Good!
LUIS: How’s it looking?
CARMEN: Great! We’re getting
a lot from every tree.
EMPLOYEE: 135, 140
kilos per tree!
LUIS: And the quality
of the fruit?
LUIS: It’s nice and dense...
LUIS: Delicious!
LUIS: There’s
hardly any pulp.
Bolaños is placing
his trust in nature.
He’s cut down on herbicides and pesticides
and is promoting a process of renaturation.
Insects and birds keep
the crops free of pests.
The farmer is reacting to the
growing demand for organic produce
and also for water
footprint certification.
Just look at that! That's our eagle. Over there
by the power cable. It’s a Bonelli's Eagle...
You never used to see
a bird like that.
And now, without even
making much of a change,
just minimizing the use of toxins so as not
to destroy its environment, it’s back.
Some farmers thought I was crazy.
They’d ask: Why are you doing this?
You're putting your
whole farm at risk.
But now, five years on: I’ve
worked hard and they see it works.
Now everybody wants
to do what I did.
The great agricultural revolution of the
21st century has begun. No doubt about it.
That over there is no longer our farm.
Look at the difference.
It’s like another world - I call it
the desert - that's Chernobyl for me.
That’s their idea of
state-of-the-art agriculture.
Luis Bolaños is fortunate, because he gets
the water he needs for his plantation
from a canal assigned to him
by the water authority.
So he’s never needed
to drill a well.
If there’s one thing he knows it’s that the future
depends on sustainable management of water resources.
We need to realize that the point of saving
water isn’t to expand irrigation areas.
What we save must be set aside for the
dry season or returned to the rivers.
We cannot save water just so
other farms can water even more.
That only exacerbates the problem:
more land, more consumption.
Recent years have seen the
popularity of the avocado soar.
Demand for this sub-tropical fruit has
risen 150 percent in the last decade.
But that has a downside.
Farmers are eager to cash in.
But avocado production is highly water-intensive,
and is worsening the water crisis in Spain.
It takes 270 liters of water
to grow just one avocado.
Spain is effectively exporting its
water resources in the form of fruit.
Javier Braun is president of the Spanish
Association of Tropical Fruit Producers.
Ok, so the avocado isn’t native
to Spain, but nor are bananas.
Only olive trees are native. But it’s
adapted perfectly to the climate.
You can see how well avocados grow here.
Why shouldn't they be cultivated here?
The harvests get bigger every year. In 2018
Spain exported 97,000 tons of avocados.
Environmental activists are always
attacking tropical fruit farmers.
They think we’re destroying everything.
I don't understand their issue.
They're against their own people.
We don't want to destroy anything.
We're helping the country and its
people, by providing them with jobs.
We could grow twice as much.
But there isn’t enough water.
For the farmers in the association,
growth is the top priority.
Any water they save thanks to modern irrigation
systems gets used to expand their plantations.
They’re also keen to dam more rivers, and
drill boreholes at higher elevations.
They say they’re hampered by red tape and left
with no choice but to act outside the law.
The water authority used to have a lot of offices
here but now there are only four people left.
The others all moved to the
headquarters in Seville.
Now there’s a new administration. We hope
the situation will start to improve.
For twelve years the
authority did nothing.
No one even looked at our proposals.
They never replied.
It wasn’t even that they were slow.
They did nothing at all.
Felipe Fuentelsaz also has
problems with bureaucracy.
The water management plan approved
in 2014 has yet to be implemented.
He’s hoping that things will start
to move at the water authority
because what’s happening in Doñana potentially
contravenes the EU’s water directive.
And that could jeopardize
agricultural subsidies.
Today he’s here to talk to the
president of the water authority.
All the farmers in Andalusia know exactly how
much water they can use and where it comes from.
They helped develop the
water management plan.
But some farmers have resorted to drastic
measures to impede the authority’s work.
On September 29th - the same day that representatives
of the European Commission were in Madrid
to talk to the government about
the water problem in Doñana -
one of my employees was threatened by farmers
who were illegally extracting water.
He’s been intimidated by a WhatsApp group.
We cannot let this sort of thing happen.
It's difficult, because these
people are often neighbors.
The ones who object or
protest feel attacked,
because we are trying to stop
illegal water extraction.
The water authority inspectors’
task is a highly delicate one.
Given the farmers’ hostility, they’re
now accompanied by the police.
They reluctantly agreed to being filmed —
on condition they can’t be identified.
Their fear of being recognized
by their neighbors is too great.
Let's have a look at the reservoir,
see how many wells supply it;
record the GPS data, and
then take some more photos.
Today they’re inspecting more than 60 illegal boreholes
in the forest. Many farmers see them as backstabbers.
INSPECTOR 1: Let’s
go take a look.
We can’t open it,
it’s locked.
Why aren’t we going in?
Because it's locked.
The person who set this up fenced and
locked it in, so no one could fall in.
There’s nothing more we can do.
We inspect.
Everything else is up to the government,
the water authority and the courts.
The water authority is powerless. It has no mandate
to intervene and is incapacitated by red tape.
INSPECTOR 1: Let's get a
few pictures of the lock.
Also of the water coming out, so we can
show that the wells are functional.
INSPECTOR 1: Now we’ll look for the
wells where the water’s coming from.
INSPECTOR 2: Yeah, back there.
It must be a well.
INSPECTOR 1: The water from the pipe there
must be coming from a well over there.
INSPECTOR 2: Yeah,
over there.
The water from the illegal boreholes
feeds into the illegal pipeline network.
Although they are drilled under cover of
darkness, traces are often left behind.
INSPECTOR 1: Cars drive along here,
so there must be something up there.
Let’s have a look.
INSPECTOR 2: Here are pipes.
And over there too.
INSPECTOR 1: Here's the fuse box.
It’s operating.
INSPECTOR 1: The pipes must come from other wells.
They come together here and lead to the reservoir.
We’ve followed their path — there’s
about six kilometers of pipe and hoses.
Then there’s a point where they go into the
ground, and a little further on they reappear.
But then they split into six different lines.
It’s impossible to follow where they lead.
These three go into the reservoir. But once
they leave the reservoir, you can’t track them.
Further proof that no one bothers
to monitor the situation properly.
Even though the tragic death of the
toddler last year raised awareness
of the widespread problem of
illegal boreholes and water theft.
INSPECTOR 1: The tragedy with
Julen was a wake-up call.
The number of illegal wells that are
reported has risen since it happened.
This one has a diameter of about 25 centimeters, so
it’s about the size of the well that Julen fell into.
Some time later a man with a
dog also fell into a borehole.
Everyone is now aware of the danger. It’s not
just animals that can fall in, people do too.
There’s water at the bottom. But it’s
not our job to cover the borehole.
Even when confronted with obvious dangers,
the inspectors are powerless to act.
With over a million illegal wells in Spain, solving
this problem is a matter of growing urgency.
