The Valencian president, Carlos Mazón, was the first to position himself in favor of transferring water by boat from the Sagunt desalination plant to Barcelona. “I am in favor of solidarity between basins and between communities; I have always been, also when we need it and when we demand it,” he said on Saturday night during an intervention before the media during the Benidorm Fest.
The words of the president of the Generalitat are not coincidental since the Alicante leader knows the water problems suffered by the south of the Valencian Community and the continuous battles with the central government and with the Executive of Castilla La Mancha over the contributions of the Tajo transfer. Safe.
Last night, after showing his willingness to bring water to Catalonia, Mazón took the opportunity to ask the Minister of Ecological Transition. Teresa Ribera, coherence: “I think this consolidates us and gives us moral authority and coherence to continue claiming that water in Spain belongs to everyone.”
The leader of the PP also demanded in his brief intervention before the journalists that Pedro Sánchez’s Executive “guarantee in writing” that the proposal to bring water from Sagunt to Catalonia “is not going to reduce the needs of Valencia” nor “is it going to harm the Valencian coast”.
As he already did after hearing the news, Mazón recalled that “we don’t like desalinated water for irrigation, it is very expensive, it is not energetically sustainable, but for an emergency, for oral use, it can be viable.”
The president stressed that the possibility of carrying out this transfer of water shows that the Valencian Community “has done its homework, has reused and has invested in the water cycle.” From Catalonia there is a lot of criticism of the Government of Pere Aragonès, precisely for not having known how to anticipate this serious drought situation.
As this newspaper has explained, the Ministry of Ecological Transition headed by Teresa Ribera is preparing to transport water by boat to Barcelona from the Sagunt desalination plant to face the emergency situation in the central region of Catalonia, including areas of Girona and the Costa Brava, due to the drought.
This initiative of the ministry would involve increasing the capacity of Sagunt’s infrastructure. The minister has guaranteed that the increase in the capacity of the desalination plant above 15% has no impact on the needs of the province of Valencia.
The Sagunt option – or what could be called the Spanish solidarity solution – also postpones the alternative consisting of connecting the Ebro water network of the Consorci d’Aigües de Tarragona in Tarragona with the metropolitan network of Barcelona.
