There are fifty villages in the Castro Marim municipal area where residents have been waiting for mains water since the first council promise in the 1980s.
While watching the decline of the rural population, while doing a lot of lamenting that soon there will no one left in these tucked away hamlets, successive council chiefs have failed to tackle one of the basics that would help entice newcomers to old villages – mains water.
Public standpipes and boreholes can not be relied on and many have a habit of drying up, leaving elderly inhabitants with an increasingly complicated journey to fill up bottles for cooking, washing and irrigation.
The current mayor of Castro Marim, Francisco Amaral, said today that for years the council has been holding out for EU funds to pay for mains water to be piped to these villages, but he now has decided to pay for the work from council funds to end ‘an injustice’ that made these inhabitants second class citizens without access to clean water.
The work began this summer and already has reached some villages to the cheery delight of locals, especially the elderly, who now have only to worry about how to pay the water bills, rather than about the lack of supply.
"These populations were supplied by fountains, the water was not treated, it was not drinking water and the situation was unsustainable. I could not wait longer for hypothetical EU funding," said the mayor who will supply “water treated with chlorine to make it drinkable."
Amaral said his administration was concerned "about 1,000 people who have just as much, or more, right to drink clean water than all the others" and considered that the current situation "is almost an attack, negative discrimination" for residents, including many elderly who have no way of buying or transporting bottled water.
"Basically, we are being fair and doing because in fact they were being treated as second class Castromarinenses," said the mayor, stating that "it is almost inhuman to oblige an elderly 70 or 80-years old to fill a bucket of water from a fountain, which isn’t even drinking water."
It may come as a surprise to many that many villages exist without mains water as the rates changed by councils for the end supply should have ensured the networks were completed years ago.
Sadly, many councils have used their monopoly positions to sell water at extortionate rates to householders, not pay Aguas do Algarve for the supply, and spend the ill-gotten profit on council running costs.
Message from Ed:
The EU wants to hear your views: how can the supply of drinking water in Europe be improved, to guarantee everyone affordable access to clean, safe water?
Read more here....http://www.algarvedailynews.com/features/home-family/3336-how-can-the-eu-improve-your-supply-of-drinking-water
