Nearly 4,000 people (1,600 according to the prefecture) demonstrated this Saturday March 16 in Villeneuve-de-la-Raho (Pyrénées-Orientales) against the project to build a golf course as well as 600 housing units near the lake.
“The number one worry is water,” confides Boris, a municipal agent, who came with his partner from a neighboring village.
We are made to believe that the golf course will be watered with water reused from the treatment plant but tomorrow, it will be water that we will simply need to drink.
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Coming from Bouleternère, around thirty kilometers away, Elsa and Julien are already experiencing climate change on a daily basis: “Last year we suffered several days of drinking water cuts, we had to be supplied with bottles.
We no longer water our garden, we collect the water from the shower…”
Also read: Henri Got, hydrogeologist: “In the Pyrénées-Orientales, the water situation will be worse in 2024 than in 2023”
“This project, intended for a privileged population in one of the poorest departments in France, is twenty years old,” says Justine Renard, one of the scientists who signed a column against golf a few weeks ago.
“This vision of land use planning is no longer tenable in the light of climate change and the historic drought that has been affecting the Pyrénées-Orientales for three years.”
In the meantime, the earthworks have begun and should continue unless the administrative court hearing scheduled for March 21 does not accept the appeals filed by the opponents or "if the Minister of Ecological Transition accedes to the request for withdrawal pure and simple of the project,” hopes Mathieu Pons-Serradail, organizer of this new mobilization.