After catastrophic floods engulfed Valencia last month, killing more than 200 people, it might seem counterintuitive to think about water shortages. But as the torrents of filthy water swept through towns and villages, people were left without electricity, food supplies – and drinking water. “It was brutal: cars, chunks of machinery, big stones, even dead bodies were swept along in the water. It gushed into the ground floor of buildings, into little shops, bakeries, hairdressers, the English school, bars: all were destroyed. This was climate change for real, climate change in capital letters,” says Josep de la Rubia of Valencia’s Ecologists in Action, describing the scene in the satellite towns south of the Valencian capital.
In the aftermath, hundreds of thousands of people were reliant on emergency tankers of water or donations of bottled water from citizen volunteers. Within a fortnight, the authorities had reconnected the tap water of 90% of the 850,000 people in affected areas, but all were advised to boil it before drinking it or to use bottled water. Across the region, 100 sewage treatment plants were damaged; in some areas, human waste seeped into flood waters, dead animals were swept into rivers and sodden rubbish and debris piled up. Valencia is on the brink of a sanitation crisis.
For more than a year before the floods, Valencia had been suffering the other extreme of climate change: drought. The two phenomena are connected – the months of hot weather raised the temperature of the sea and the humidity in the air, resulting in sudden and intense downpours. A year’s worth of rain fell in just 24 hours in some parts of Valencia.
Extreme weather is being felt across Spain. “I watched with horror, sadness and astonishment when the floods engulfed Valencia,” says Roser Albó Garriga, a farmer in the mountains of Catalonia a few hundred miles north, who is suffering water scarcity. Recent heavy rains round Barcelona have not reached her area. “In the last few years, we haven’t had enough water to grow our crops or even to drink,” she says. Sudden torrential downpours do not resolve water shortages, she adds. Catalonia had unusually heavy rains in 2020, followed by four years of drought. “The truth is that these types of rains cause damage and misfortune,” she says, “but most of the water just ends up in the sea because the parched land can’t absorb it when so much falls all at once.”
But while Garriga and other Catalans have been suffering water shortages in recent years, there’s one group of people that appears to be immune, and even profits from them: the multinational companies extracting millions of litres of water from the very same land. This isn’t just a Spanish issue – across the world, from Uruguay to Mexico, Canada to the UK, many have begun to question whether private corporations should be allowed to siphon off a vital public resource, then sell it back to citizens as bottled water.
The tragedy in Spain makes the country one of the canaries in the coalmine when it comes to understanding the global threat to water security. Can the growing number of angry citizens surrounded by private water plants but left without safe water in their homes force a rethink of how this resource is managed? And as weather patterns change, should private companies continue to have easy access to vital reserves of underground water?
Roser’s mother, Rosita Garriga, places a metal jug of rich, dark hot chocolate on the table, so thick it’s almost like custard. Aged 81, with neat blond curls, she has lived in this farmhouse in the hills of Catalonia since she got married at the age of 18, and is disturbed by the changes she has seen. “There used to be so many springs here, but now they’ve almost all dried up. There’s been less rain, yes, but I think the water-bottling companies are also sucking it up.”
There are six water-bottling plants within a 10-mile radius, including one run by Nestlé and another by French multinational Danone. They pump up mineral water from the aquifer beneath the Montseny mountain range and put it in plastic bottles to sell in Spain and abroad. Catalonia has the highest concentration of water-bottling plants in Spain; across the region, 27 extraction licences have been granted. “There’s more water carried along the roads in lorries than is running in our streams,” Rosita says.
Today, Roser looks after their farm, which is spread over terraces down the hillside. “We used to feed ourselves all year round. We grew broccoli, beans, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, plus maize and grass for our dairy cows. Now, it’s so dry, we can hardly grow anything,” she says, pointing to the unplanted beds, as she lets the parched, sand-coloured soil run through her fingers. “I don’t think water-bottling companies are the only problem, but why do they keep taking water when we are running out?”
After a short walk up through a forest of chestnut, oak and hazelnut trees, Roser points out the stream that used to be her family’s only source of drinking water. There’s still a trickle coming down, but not enough to keep the pool at the bottom from turning stagnant. This area is called Riells – derived from the Latin rivulus for “small stream”. But for the last 10 years, Roser has had to drive to a supermarket to buy bottled water to drink. “It’s a cheek – the companies are extracting the water from under our feet, and selling it back to us,” she says. Each month she buys 24 five‑litre bottles of water – brands such as Viladrau and Font Vella, produced by Nestlé and Danone from local water. “It costs us €67 a month. It’s ruining us,” she says.
In nearby villages, it’s a similar story. Nil Papiol is the mayor of Hostalric, a medieval walled fortress town high up in the hills. In an airy town hall room, decked with a red and yellow Catalan flag, he lays a map out on a table. He points out that four bottling plants are extracting water next to the source of the river that supplies the town. When drought hit the region last year, Hostalric’s reservoir ran dry and water stopped flowing from the taps. Papiol, who is young, with a neat clipped beard, chooses his words carefully. “I cannot say whether the extraction of water by the bottling companies contributed to the shortages, but I think it is vital that there is a comprehensive study of the region’s water resources to assess the possible impacts.” Here, too, many villagers had no option but to drink bottled water, effectively buying back water from their own local sources.
In February 2024, the Catalonia authorities declared a drought emergency, having suffered 40 months of below average rainfall. This meant 80% of the population of Catalonia, including people in Barcelona, faced fines if they used more than 200 litres a day for drinking, washing and cleaning. Water restrictions were also imposed on agriculture and most industries, but no limits were placed on bottling companies.
Pep Camp lives at the end of a cobbled street by Hostalric’s arched stone gateway. He is the head of the residents’ association. “I can’t describe what a shock it was to turn on the tap and see nothing coming out. You don’t know how valuable something is until you lose it,” he says. “Some people say that the bottling companies bring jobs, but we need to understand that water is a scarce resource, it could run out.”
This area is known for its streams cascading through damp forests. But after weeks of shortages, Hostalric’s authorities had to connect the village’s water supply to a desalination plant, pumping seawater into people’s kitchens and toilets through pipes running up from the coast 20km away.
In nearby Gualba, the local council had to take equally drastic action when their river and reservoir ran dry last year. They connected their taps to a disused marble mine, but found that the water was unsafe to drink. So they paid for hundreds of plastic tubs of water, which were driven up to the village in a constant stream of trucks from January to March this year. Councillor Jordi Esmandia, who was elected in 2023 just as the water was running out, says the stress was intense. “On Christmas Eve, I was phoning round, trying to find water for the town,” he says. He is convinced that the bottling companies are exacerbating water scarcity. Despite stretching the finances of the village council to breaking point, the tubs of water provided only about half the amount normally consumed in the municipality, so many people in Gualba had to buy their own.
“A company called Aquaservice came round door to door. They offered to install a water dispenser in my house and give me two months’ water free,” says Gualba resident Anita Fornons. “Lots of people in the village signed up. Even though the tap water is back on now, we still buy it from them because we’ve signed a contract.”
Aquaservice supplies water in big plastic dispensers, like office water coolers, to homes and businesses across the country. It extracts water from four sites in Spain and is owned by American Liquid Packaging Systems, one of the holdings of the California-based venture capital firm Amidi Group, which also owns Chemtex, a company that distributes raw plastic resins for food packaging and plastic containers.
Fornons, a singer, is cheery and exuberant, stopping every few minutes to chat or chuckle with a neighbour, as she walks through the village to her allotment. She used to grow lettuce, onions, artichokes, peppers and three varieties of tomatoes for her family – she has an 18-year-old son and a husband who works in an iron foundry. But for the past three years, the land’s been too dry. Holding out a shrivelled brown bud from an apple tree, she says, “Now we buy vegetables from a supermarket as well as buying water. It all adds up.”
The Spanish mineral water association categorically rejects the idea that the industry is contributing to shortages. It points out that mineral water companies use just 0.03% of total subterranean water resources in Spain, according to the Geological and Mining Institute, which is part of the science ministry. “In Spain, when a mineral water concession is granted, the competent authorities establish a maximum flow rate for use, which guarantees the water level of each spring and, therefore, its sustainability,” it says.
But not all are convinced. Determined to find out how much water the bottling companies were extracting in the Montseny region, Carles Lumeras spent nine weeks this year sitting on the roadside counting the lorries coming out of the plants. A member of the environmental organisation Coordinating Group for the Protection of Montseny, he has been worried about the expansion of bottling plants since the 1990s, but says it is only in recent years, as water shortages have started to bite, that locals have begun to get organised.
From 6am to 10pm, he and 15 other volunteers took turns to sit outside four plants around the municipality of Arbúcies, including Nestlé’s factory. They are drab-looking warehouses with towers of blue and red crates stacked in the yard outside. Some companies drill for water directly beneath the bottling factories, others, like Nestlé, have wells – locked in little brick huts – dotted along local mountain paths. The group counted a total of 185 trucks leaving the four plants each day. Multiplying the number of crates of water each lorry carried, they calculated that these four sites were manufacturing 5.6m litres of water a day, equivalent to 1.8bn litres a year. “That is an enormous amount of water, an enormous volume of plastic,” Lumeras says.
While his figures are rough estimates, worldwide it is clear that large volumes of water are being extracted. Last year, 408bn litres of bottled water were sold, and this figure is expected to rise to 425bn litres in 2024, according to data analytics firm Euromonitor International. Despite concerns about plastic use, the volume of bottled water sold has risen by more than 50% over the last 10 years. And it’s big business: last year, global sales totalled US$312bn.
Coca-Cola is the biggest supplier of bottled water worldwide, followed by Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo, according to Euromonitor International. These multinationals have been gradually buying up well‑known local brands and their rights to extract water from aquifers across the world. In Europe, for example, Nestlé owns Perrier and Vittel in France, San Pellegrino and Aqua Panna in Italy, as well as Buxton in the UK. Meanwhile, Danone owns the French brands Evian, Volvic and Badoit, as well as Harrogate Spring Water in the UK.
In Spain, there are many local players, but foreign multinationals have an increasing presence. Nestlé’s two brands, Aquarel and Viladrau, are sourced from Catalonia. Danone produces Font Vella and Lanjarón at plants in Catalonia and Granada, while Coca-Cola extracts mineral water for its aquaBona brand from four sites in Spain. This is in addition to the large volumes of water it uses in Spain for its soft drinks. Meanwhile, PepsiCo takes water from a Spanish aquifer for its Aquafina brand.
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Nestlé says in a statement, “Water stewardship has always been a guiding principle for Nestlé Waters, underpinning the business model for each of our factories and for the local communities of stakeholders who rely on these shared water resources”, while a spokesperson for Coca-Cola Europacific Partners says, “We treat water with the care it deserves and are committed to protecting local water sources. We work closely with local stakeholders to ensure we are protecting watersheds and the availability of water resources. Last year, across Europe, we returned 98.7% of the water used in the production of our drinks.”
Across the country, more than 160 licences to extract water have been granted to bottling companies, including in the hottest, southernmost regions of Spain. Dúrcal is a village of whitewashed houses and red-tiled roofs, surrounded by slopes of olive groves and almond trees in Andalucía. One afternoon in 2006, Rosa María Fernández was out walking when she noticed lorries and diggers scooping up the pale yellow earth on the hillside overlooking her home. “I was curious, a bit uneasy,” she says. Each morning, when she hung out the washing on her terrace, she would look up and see the diggers there, wondering what was up, until one day she read in a local newspaper that a bottling plant was being built. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought, there’s not even any water here but, oh, they’re digging a well 250 metres deep.”
These foothills of the Sierra Nevada look arid, but the Lecrín valley down below is fertile, watered by the melting snow that trickles down over rocks and through crevices to replenish streams, rivers and groundwater reserves. But, like the rest of the country, Andalucía has recently suffered drought, and climate change has reduced the snowfall on the mountains. “The plant was being built next to the well that supplies the whole of Dúrcal,” Fernández says. “Everyone was worried. A meeting was called in the village and 400 people turned up.”
Fernández has been employed as a rural labourer, a cleaner and a worker in the sprawling industrial greenhouses in the neighbouring province of Almería. Now she spends her time looking after her elderly mother and aunt. “I’d never been an activist, but we began to organise protests. We wanted information from the town hall. It was the beginning of a citizens’ movement,” she says.
Despite their efforts, the plant began operations in 2019. It is owned by Aquadeus, a joint venture between the Spanish food manufacturer Grupo Fuertes and the French bottled-water company Alma, which also has several wells in Britain. Fernández relights the roll-up that is ever-present in her hands. “From my terrace, I can see the lights of the plant at night,” she says. “It pumps up water 24 hours a day.”
Many Dúrcal residents believe it is affecting local water sources. Fernández shows me a well-known local spring that has dried up and a well where the water level has fallen by eight metres.
But for Fernández, worse was to come. By scouring the internet, she and other local activists discovered that two more bottling plants were planned in the same valley. Outraged, she went to neighbouring villages, handing out leaflets warning people of the plans. José Manuel Henríquez, a former policeman, met Fernández in the village of Cónchar. “It was like a doctor telling me I had an incurable disease,” he says. “I thought, why me? We all felt like this. We have a nice quiet little village. We live off the land, we don’t have industries here. Why us?” He wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo “Embotelladora, no” (No to the bottlers). I chat to him sitting on the whitewashed steps of Cónchar. Next to him is Francisco López, a former postman, whose T-shirt reads “El agua no se vende” (Water is not for sale). They tell me that the residents of Cónchar and nearby Padul have launched a campaign. They have collected 30,000 signatures on a petition, and held marches with banners reading “Stop the theft of water” and “Water bottlers out of our valley”. “The only good thing to come out of this,” Henríquez says, “is that our village is more united than ever. We’ve forgotten all our petty arguments and come together.”
In total, there are 18 water-bottling concessions in Andalucía. The oldest is Lanjarón, about 10 miles from Fernández’s village. Its springs were named “medicinal mineral waters” in 1818 and people have flocked there ever since to drink or bathe in its waters. A commercial bottling plant opened in the 1950s, which was bought by Danone in 1992. Lanjarón is still a spa town popular with tourists, its streets lined with shops selling wicker baskets, painted ceramics, almonds and dried figs. The plant has provided jobs there for decades, and Danone helps fund municipal projects. While there has been a vocal campaign in this region against the bottling industry, there have been no protests in Lanjarón.
José Antonio Ramos, a former mayor of the town, says, “Of course people are happy with the plant being here. It’s the biggest employer and it offers excellent working conditions.” But Danone’s plan to expand the plant has caused unease even among its firmest supporters. It is drilling an exploratory well just above a valley where Ramos and others own plots of land. “I’m not concerned about the company expanding in principle. It would be great if there were 3,000 new jobs here,” Ramos says, “but this could affect the spring we use to water our olive groves.”
Danone says, “We recognise the challenges facing local communities and the need for long-term solutions to address the impacts of climate change on global water resources. We are fully committed to sustainable water management. The request for further exploration of Lanjarón land seeks to ensure access to mineral water in the future, as a preventive measure against the effects of climate change. We understand businesses like ours have more to do. Water is a shared resource, and every player has a role to play in protecting this resource.”
For Fernández, who is now part of the campaign group Platform for the Defence of the Water of Lecrín Valley, this underlines the wider question at stake. “Who does water belong to? What I am worried about is the concentration of power; the privatisation of a resource like water, which is essential for our fields, for bees, for birds, for water-snails, for all of life.”
It’s not just in Spain that people are questioning the right of private companies to exploit springs and aquifers. Protesters banging empty plastic bottles came out on to the streets of Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, last year, when the city ran out of drinking water. After three years of drought, the authorities began to mix diluted seawater into the public supplies, making tap water salty and unsafe to drink. Uruguayans had no option but to buy bottled water, and there’s one brand that dominates the supermarket shelves: Salus. For more than 100 years, a local company bottled this water sourced from a spring in a cavern – discovered by a puma, according to local legend – in south-eastern Uruguay. That company was bought by Danone in 2000. Just as in Spain, drought-stricken Uruguayans were buying bottled water from a foreign company that was extracting it from their national territory.
The slogan of the protesters was “No es Sequía, es Saqueo” (It’s not drought, it’s looting), implying private corporations’ excessive use of water was the underlying reason for shortages. This slogan has been used across Latin America. It could be heard in Mexico, in 2022, when people in Monterrey were complaining they had no water to drink in a drought, while companies such as Coca-Cola were extracting groundwater for their drinks lines, including its Topo Chico mineral water.
Britain had a very rainy summer this year, so water scarcity may feel like a distant problem. But the Environment Agency warns that England will run short of water within 25 years if steps are not taken. Wales is predicted to suffer more droughts, and Scotland faces increased water scarcity in summer. Meanwhile, multinationals are pumping billions of litres of water a year from natural sources across the country.
The United Nations special rapporteur for water, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, has seen water conflicts increase across the world. He says, “The commodification of drinking water is immoral” and selling bottled water “is privatising a vital necessity that we all need to live. It’s like bottling fresh air.” Advocating the immediate banning of water in plastic bottles “which are an environmental disaster”, he says, we should take a “human rights-based approach” to water distribution. Governments must prioritise the provision of drinking water to the population, above any private interest, and plan ahead for droughts and other emergencies.
Back in Valencia, hundreds of thousands of people still have no choice but to get water from emergency tankers or use bottled water. The authorities are working hard to ensure there are no traces of toxic chemicals or faecal matter in the water supplies of the worst affected areas. Yet private companies have nine concessions to extract water for bottling from local aquifers in the Valencia region. The majority of these are foreign-owned, such as California-based Aquaservice, the company that touted water dispensers to drought-stricken villagers including Anita Fornons in Gualba. Or Coca-Cola, which pumps water for its aquaBona brand from an aquifer in Requena, a town in the west of Valencia province that suffered some of the heaviest downpours during the recent floods. These private companies have access to underground stores of crystalline high-quality drinking water, which are better protected from pollution than rivers and reservoirs.
In Valencia, as in other areas of the world, a disaster-stricken population has suddenly found itself reliant on bottled water, sourced locally but owned by private corporations. And, as Roser Albó Garriga in the hills of Catalonia has discovered, when global temperatures rise, even the wettest regions can see their habitats change. “We used to have springs bubbling up everywhere. I never dreamed I’d have to buy water to drink. Last year, we had to ask neighbours lower down the valley to give us tubs of water just so we could wash. So to see trucks drive away from here, full of bottles of water, breaks my heart.”
