A farming family has been sentenced to more than three years in prison in Spain for illegally taking water from Doñana Park, a World Heritage site that has become a symbol of the country’s water shortage.
• Also read: Sports betting manipulation: They intercepted the game signal a few seconds beforehand
• Also read: Man arrested after touching journalist’s buttocks
According to the September 18 verdict, obtained by AFP on Friday, the convicts – four men and one woman, members of the same siblings – were found guilty of crimes against the environment for causing “a serious danger to the ecosystem.” ” of this protected area of Andalusia (South).
According to the daily El País, this prison sentence is the first for illegal water pumping in Doñana, a natural park that has been at the center of political debates for months.
The convicts withdrew nearly 40 million cubic meters of water for their fields between 2008 and 2013, twice as much as they were allowed, leaving the groundwater table in a “poor condition”.
They had already been sanctioned around ten times in the past because of their water consumption.
In addition to the prison sentence, they must pay two million euros to the public body responsible for water management in the Guadalquivir basin and are also not allowed to grow anything for two years.
Doñana, a reserve that is home to thousands of animal and plant species across its 100,000 hectares of lagoons, swamps, dunes and forests, is threatened by both Spain’s ongoing drought and the ravages of intensive agriculture.
A controversial bill from the right-wing regional government could be passed in the coming weeks that aims to expand the current irrigation zone by legalizing hundreds of hectares of illegal red fruit harvests around the park.
Spain’s left-wing central government has said it will take the matter to court if this regional law is passed, while UNESCO has warned the park could lose its world heritage status.
The Doñana issue had taken center stage in the campaign for local elections in May and parliamentary elections in July in a country where 80% of freshwater resources are consumed by agriculture.