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).