The drinking water crisis in Costa Rica’s Talamanca will get worse without a plan from the institutions.
In Tanagra de Celia de Sixaola, a barefoot boy arrives to carry water in a plastic container. He fills the white and somewhat dirty container into a pipe that supplies almost 40 houses, where more than 130 people live. He does this at a distance from his home, which means that his family does not have access to drinking water at home (according to national statistics), which means that a human right enshrined in the Costa Rican Constitution is violated every day.
In this community, 10 km from the Panamanian border, there are three ‘previstas’ (service connections provided by AyA) on the main road to Sixaola. The owner’s house is connected to one of these ‘previstas’; in another, some 13 houses have been connected by laying hoses and pipes to bring water to the buildings, most of which are informal and needy; and from the third, they extend to a pipe in the main road of Tanagra, where buckets and containers are filled to take home. More than 200 people live here in just over 50 homes.
Nearby, in Zavala, also in the district of Sixaola, the situation is the same, but there is only one water supply, which serves families in 42 houses, ranches and even a small room that used to be home to banana workers: settlements of more than 200 people. Drinking water for human consumption has long been a luxury here and in many other parts of Talamanca.
“There are pipes that have burst. The pipe was always leaking. So we all went to tell them ‘either they fix it or they’ll see what they’re doing’, because here you can’t waste a little bit of water, right now water is gold,” said Josefa López Hernández, a resident and well-known leader of Zavala.
“(After the banana company left) we started having problems with water because they started making artesian (sic) wells. Three children died there because people were not used to filtering or boiling water. A foundation came and donated filters. We have the pipe because we asked the owner for permission and he let us put it there,” said Santo Lira Jirón, a community leader in Tanagra, describing a problem that has been going on for 20 years.
They are part of the half of Talamanca’s population that does not have access to drinking water. In their homes they have no water for drinking, bathing, cooking… The Institute of Aqueducts and Sewers (AyA) is aware of the crisis, as its own National Water Laboratory (LNA) has alerted it. However, there is no action plan, strategy or even a document on how to solve the problem.
In 2020, the laboratory pointed out that Talamanca was the canton in red in the province of Limón in terms of lack of drinking water. The drinking water gap was 0.57: out of almost 21,000 inhabitants, only 11,776 had drinking water in their homes. This means that almost half of the population (43%) did not have access to this service. The canton of Talamanca must be given immediate priority attention,’ the laboratory concluded.
The last alert was in June 2024, when Talamanca was ranked fifth in the table of cantons with the highest number of homes and population without water supply for human use and consumption, with 1,126 homes in this state, inhabited by 3,491 people. The report made estimates based on data from the 2022 census, which did not cover the entire population, so the severity of the crisis could be greater.
AyA based its population estimates on an average of 3.1 people per household. Furthermore, it only took into account localities with 10 or more dwellings in each canton, so that in cantons such as Talamanca – with a very low housing density – the disparity could be even greater. This explains the large difference between the numbers of people with access in reports from the same laboratory at different times.
This is also known by the municipality of Talamanca, whose council declared a social emergency in November 2020 due to the lack of drinking water. But the cantonal regulatory plan at issue, defended by Mayor Rugeli Morales Rodríguez and even President Rodrigo Chaves Robles, encourages more construction, arguing that AyA will be supported to “guarantee the supply of drinking water to coastal communities”, without saying how, without indicating where the liquid will come from and without mentioning the crisis.
The controversial document even argues that “the current installed capacity is sufficient to meet medium- and long-term demand”, although it does not cite any studies to this effect.
The majority of the population in Tanagra are indigenous Ngäbe, many of whom are binational (Costa Rican and Panamanian citizens) and work for the transnational agro-industrial companies that grow bananas in Sixaola or sell the fruit they produce themselves. There are also Panamanians, Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans, according to a risk prevention assessment carried out by the National University with the community in 2014.
Tanagra and Zavala are the names of the banana farms where the workers and their families used to live. Land that the companies abandoned 20 years ago, along with those known as Talamanca, La Bribri and others. This was after the great flood of 2005, which damaged the crops.
Both sites were consolidated as shantytowns. At that time, the companies provided water for human consumption, as others do today in the Sixaola estates, which they still exploit and produce. After they left, the pipeline was closed in these two communities and others nearby.
The banana plantation used to supply water to all the houses. After the banana companies went bankrupt and we stayed here, there was no water service and we each made our own artesian well, each of us made our own well as best we could, because what were we going to live on,’ recalls Josefa López Hernández.
In Zavala, more than 200 people in over 40 houses juggle with water. A single pipe for so many irregular connections is not enough. They accumulate liquid that is improved by those who have a donated filter; some get up earlier to wash because there are water cuts; and they use wells that are already contaminated because they are very close to septic tanks.
Everyone is worried because if they cut off the water we have now, it will be with contaminated wells. Samples have already been taken here, both by the (National) University and the Ministry of Health, and they said it was contaminated water, apparently with faeces. We have to continue with the wells, if they come to cut them, which they can do, they have already cut one on the other side of the road. Because even if the water is contaminated, what are we going to do?
According to Santo Lira, who used to be a member of the Asociación de Desarrollo Integral (ADI) of Celia – a community in Sixaola that includes Tanagra and Zavala – AyA has refused their request to bring drinking water to their homes, claiming that they do not own the land. The land is still in the name of other people, companies and even banks.
However, AyA’s regulations for the provision of services provide for the possibility of granting a special connection to residents of properties without title deeds. The request must be made by an ADI or an organisation with a legal identity card; it must have the consent of the registered owner; and it must be examined and approved by AyA.
The availability of water from the AyA – an indispensable procedure for obtaining a building permit – has increased in the last 5 years. But due to the hydro-meteorological drought that has affected water sources in the South Caribbean for more than two years, AyA has stopped processing new services.
What we have is a water capacity analysis that we did ourselves, which shows that the aqueduct is in deficit and that new services are therefore only being processed in areas that are already covered,’ AyA replied when asked about the crisis.
