“We are also animals and we need to eat,” claims the owner of a grocery store at the entrance to Lucena del Puerto, whose door bears the sign “Doñana we are all.” Here is an agricultural and rural town in Huelva, very rural, that he feels humiliated – they are the “water thieves” because of their illegal wells – and aspires to have the same consideration as the species in the park.

There is a lack of water, but here there is tomato and not for frying. “Here everyone decides except us. Everything is decided outside”, sums up the outgoing mayor, the independent Manuel Mora, a professor of History and Geography at the institute, who considers that a sort of sepoy revolt has broken out.

Lucena del Puerto is grouped at the top of a hill, white houses, on top of the church of San Vicente Mártir, retirees with furrows and the overwhelming majority of foreign workers, without problems of coexistence.

60 years ago, before the strawberry boom, the children left this town for Germany or Barcelona. Today, at a bus stop, they advertise coach tickets to Romania, very close to one of the various halal butcher shops.

The town smokes. Its people smoke. In this region, an Andalusian, Spanish and European battle is being waged that surpasses them, as if they were the villagers of Waterloo on the eve of June 18, 1815. For decades, wells were sought for crops, the only way to overcome hunger. “When I was a child, my grandparents told us not to touch the strawberries because he believed they could be poisonous”, recalls an octogenarian sitting in front of the Coophuelva cooperative, “the strawberry cooperative”, as it is known in the town.

And it was the strawberry, well paid, that half a century ago brought prosperity to the town, close to the Doñana park, a natural space that they considered theirs and today they are beginning to dislike it despite the fact that they say they love and appreciate it the most. However, the thesis that their species, their fauna, matters more to the world than they do, has spread. And they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong except subsist as best they can until they prosper.

The crops were traditional, rainfed. And the strawberry appeared and then the strawberries and now also the blueberries. They needed more water. They dug wells. Some without entrusting themselves to God or the devil. Until four years ago, the one in San Quintín was set up because fines rained down: many wells did not have a permit. And times, and time, have changed…

A group of retirees in the Plaza de la Constitución, where the town hall, the church and the bust of a Doñana lynx stand. Saturday at noon. How do you live this fight between the Junta de Andalucía –whose brand new irrigation law would help to legalize the town’s wells- and the Government of Spain and the European Commission?

A spontaneous spokesperson goes on the attack.

-How would you feel if you did not have water at home having it where you live?

-Outraged.

-Hey, that’s it. And why in Almonte, three kilometers from Doñana, can they draw all the water they want and here, 30 kilometers from the park, they can’t?

-Because?

-Because in Almonte they have more balls! And no one dares with them. And I will tell you more: the fault is not only Sánchez’s, it is the European Union’s, which are the owners of Doñana.

The inhabitants of Lucena del Puerto are like this: either they don’t talk to journalists –many sanctions for illegal wells in 2019 were based on the photographs and filming that appeared in the media, collected by the Civil Guard for identification purposes- or They speak loud and clear.

“People don’t think it’s fair that they’re known as ‘water criminals.’ What is happening now is the revolt of the sepoys in India -I am a history teacher-, they treat us as if we were not capable of managing our lands, our houses”, points out the mayor, a former communist and independent, who already was. between 2007 and 2015 and today it lashes out, like half the town, against the PSOE for considering that it uses the Doñana park to erode the PP.

Patrick is from Ghana, he has vision problems, but he still works in whatever comes out, and he has lived here for fifteen years. “I like it,” he sums up.

On Friday, at six in the evening, a bus left dozens of workers on the main street, next to the El Principito playground, after an intense day: we are in the throes of the strawberry season.

This sort of multi-ethnic town is surprising, where several grocery stores display the Magasin Romanesc sign and the main computer store alternates the sale of mobile phones and accessories with five booths and the services of international remittance companies. “There is no problem of coexistence, except for some isolated friction. The people of the town know that without the immigrants there would be no collection”, estimates the mayor Manuel Mora.

The figures given by the city council are impressive. If there are postulates on the street that are in tune with Vox – a defender together with the PP of legalizing the wells and protecting them – other aspects are the opposite. Thus, immigrants are welcome and none of the interviewees have expressed any complaint.

“The environment is important, but we all want to eat. You should have seen this store ten years ago, you couldn’t fit it. Almost all of them were foreigners,” says Zoilo Betanzos Calero, owner of the Bezma computer store and proud father of Blanca Betanzos, five-time world champion in athletics for people with disabilities – “she has Down syndrome” – and the town’s favorite daughter.

Immigrants don’t stop coming in. The atmosphere is cordial. A mobile? Well, nice and cheap, right? A Romanian woman asks if she can make a color photocopy of a medical test on diskette for her. “Fly on Tuesday, I have a lot of work and I won’t open tomorrow, Saturday.” The lady mumbles. A few meters below, in the tobacconist’s, the orderly queue is made up of North African men.

Lucena del Puerto has 3,261 inhabitants, of which 56% are immigrants. According to the mayor himself, today, we must add between 7,500 and 8,000 temporary workers or in the process of regularization, so the town is close to 14,000 people these days. There is nothing the absence of xenophobia…

Between 50 and 60% are Romanians, 20%, on the rise, are North African and 10-12% sub-Saharan. The rest is mixed, with some Latinos, Poles and Bulgarians.

“They come to earn a living, like when we went to Germany,” says the eighty-year-old from the cooperative, who does not want to give his name or want trouble because his son has a position on the irrigation board and fear of ” compromising him” (aftermath of the 2019 sanctions, supported by journalistic content).

The scarcity of water has exposed many contradictions, including social ones. “The strawberry finished off the gentlemen and now it has brought us other gentlemen,” says the octogenarian who remembers how in his childhood the people of the town waited for the raffle in the square of powerful families. “This one, yes, this one no…”.

Thanks to the new crops, small farmers prospered, expanded land or sold it. Older owners lost relevance. “Over the years, the strawberry that ended with the gentlemen, has created new gentlemen –estimates the mayor, close today to positions of the PP-. I am referring to the socialists who not only have not managed Doñana and the water well in these 38 years in the Junta, but have allowed abuses and have benefited from subsidies thanks to the fact that they set the rules and regulations. If you dissect the vote here, the small farmers vote independent, the medium ones for the PP and the large ones for the PSOE”.

If we turn to history, Ben Gurion, one of the founders of the State of Israel, who is celebrating his 75th birthday these days, defined the problems in the region with a phrase: “too much history for so little territory”. Here, in Condado de Huelva, the largest region in the province -one of the rainiest in Spain-, it would seem that there are too many uses -and interests- for so little water.

The matter fuels local quarrels, provincial grievances. “It’s good that the hotels and swimming pools on the coast have water,” says the octogenarian in the shadow of the strawberry cooperative, where trucks arrive to load at a good pace.

“They are hitting us with spikes. How will this end? This is going to have to be negotiated…”, predicts Manuel Mora. And apply some new supervision criteria that give an exit to the puzzle of the classification of the land and its wells.

This weekend there is a truce. Last night a festival was held to have fun, of course, and to raise funds for the May Crosses, a very pleasing religious festival that Andalusians imprint on faith. Lucena del Puerto does not seem like a decadent town, although all those consulted assure that without water, as the Government of Spain wants, goodbye to the town, another white town of Andalusia.