Box 7. Groundwater laws in Spain largely ignored?
The 1985 Water Law, declared that groundwater would be in ‘public ownership’. This represented a fundamental change to water rights. Yet this major change, compounded by lack of knowledge about the legal changes and groundwater use, and a poor information campaign, has led to many situations of ‘hydrologic disobedience’ in relation to water rights and abstraction in almost every stressed aquifer. Indeed, the question remains as to what came frst, hydrologic disobedience or stressed aquifers. A typical example of this situation is the Upper Guadiana Basin (Lopez-Gunn and Llamas, 1999).