La Marina Baja Water Consortium (1950–1978): Hydro-Economic Model of Water Governance behind Tourism Development in Benidorm (Spain)

Abstract

This paper analyzes the events that originated an integrated water resources management (IWRM) model called Consorcio de Aguas de la Marina Baja (CAMB), in the province of Alicante (Spain), in 1978. The impact of tourism and population growth in the second half of the 20th century motivated the need for new management formulas seeking a balance between available resources and a greater need for water resources. The emergence of mass tourism in Benidorm at the end of the 1950s generated a great imbalance between the needs and availability of water resources. Also considering the effect of periods of severe drought, the solution to the deficit was found in the principles of institutional economics and circular water management. Water infrastructure and technology are elements of great importance in this model, allowing the exchange of natural water for reclaimed water, as a result of previous agreements between traditional irrigators and supply users of coastal populations. Its success has guaranteed the coexistence of traditional agriculture and the consolidated tourism activity, making possible the conservation of the cultural landscape. The historical and economic analysis of the model that led to the creation of CAMB can be applied to other regions facing similar challenges.

1. Introduction

This research focuses on the events that led to the gestation of a model of integrated management of water resources, constituting the entity called La Marina Baja Water Consortium (Consorcio de Aguas de La Marina Baja, CAMB, in Spanish) in 1978, located in the district called La Marina Baja, whose head is the city of Benidorm (province of Alicante, Spain). The impact of tourism since the second half of the 20th century in this region motivated the need to find new management formulas: the increase in demography, the massive arrival of tourists, urban development with new accommodation, a greater demand for energy resources and the food associated with this growth led the actors involved to seek a balance between available resources and a greater need for water resources. After some frustrated attempts during the first decades of the second half of the 20th century, the need and the experience accumulated over the years to deal with water scarcity, recurrent periods of drought and increasing demand resulted—almost intuitively—in a management model that responded to the water supply problems of this region in southeastern Spain according to the principles of good water governance [1].

The main economic activities in La Marina Baja until the 1950s were fishing and agriculture and, from a demographic point of view, the district had hardly experienced any changes since 1840. Nevertheless, from the second half of the 1950s, the Spanish economy experienced a process of international reintegration and internal liberalization that resulted in a period of unprecedented economic growth. These facts propitiated the appearance of mass tourism in Benidorm. As a consequence, urban development and demographic growth took place, which in just a few decades generated a great imbalance between the needs for and availability of water resources. This scarcity, together with different periods of severe drought, such as those that occurred in 1968–1969 and 1978–1984, motivated the implementation of this water governance model based on the principles of institutional economics [2] and circular water management [3]. Water infrastructure and technology were of great importance, allowing a system of exchanges of natural water for reclaimed water between traditional irrigators and users in the primary phase. These social agreements and the formalization of La Marina Baja Water Consortium allowed the configuring, after a historical process, of a model of integrated water resources management (IWRM) [1] that bet on what, decades later, was called technological neutrality: the use of all available technologies to achieve the objectives. This success has allowed two economic activities to coexist in the district in a way that is compatible with the conservation of the cultural landscape: traditional agriculture and the currently consolidated tourism industry.

The hypothesis put forward in this research study is based on demonstrating how dry or semi-arid territories, traditionally dedicated to agriculture and with water scarcity and periods of severe drought, experiencing a rise in new economic activities that require a high demand for resources can find a balance between demand and supply, thanks to governance and IWRM, for the benefit of all stakeholders. Thus, the main aim of this work is to complete the analysis of the case study in La Marina Baja district with a historical perspective to find interrelationships between tourism-driven economic development and the economic background, focusing on the period prior to its implementation and founding years (1950–1978), as well as institutional decisions determining the constitution of this IWRM model.

2. Methodology

The methodology of this research combined qualitative analysis of literature and archive documents of the Benidorm City Council, such as meeting minutes or correspondence, together with interviews with stakeholders and a historiographer, whose names have been included in the acknowledgements section. Moreover, based on a close analysis of the statistical sources and the academic literature, the case study will provide a valuable insight about the gestation of the consortium. Methods are based on institutional analysis underpinnings which link method to synthesis and theory building, through a process of rigorous screening in which institutions and society have played an important role in producing local socioeconomic outcomes or structural changes.

Public and private statistical databases have been gathered to fulfill the analysis. On the one hand, the private database obtained from Fundación Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria is specified in section number 4. On the other hand, the public database is compiled by the National Statistics Institute of Spain. Both institutions made intensive efforts to formulate methodological notes in their respective documents or datasheets, reflecting the potential limitations or biases in the economic data published. Nonetheless, by assuming they contain the most accurate information available, these documents and datasets make it possible for the macroeconomic evolution behind management changes to illustrate how effective good water governance is in terms of institutional economy.

3. Study Area, Historical Droughts and Geographical Context

The main climatological characteristic of the southeastern peninsular region is aridity, which results in the existence of an intense water deficit in the region, considering the meager and irregular rainfall, the high potential evapotranspiration and the persistence of continuous periods of drought [4]. In the district of La Marina Baja, two historical moments related to droughts marked its evolution: the first occurred during the seventeenth century and is interrelated with the implementation of a piece of infrastructure known by the name of Séquia Mare; the second was the articulation of an institution, La Marina Baja Water Consortium, in 1978.

Little is known about the importance of water in La Marina Baja district and Benidorm before the second half of the twentieth century. During much of the sixteenth century, Benidorm had only 6 or 7 inhabitants to take care of the Castle of Benidorm, as the site had been depopulated as a result of the Berber attacks in 1503. It was in 1666 when Beatriz de Fajardo, who had inherited the lordships of Polop and Benidorm in the Kingdom of Valencia, completed the piece of infrastructure commonly called Séquia Mare, which crossed much of the district. The first investment she made was the Séquia Mare [5], in order to increase the population of the affected land and collect more manorial rents in Benidorm, La Nucía and Alfaz del Pi, settlements repopulated since then. This water infrastructure was the main vector that allowed the urban and demographic development of the district [6].

Periods of drought proved to be a powerful incentive for the improvement of the management of the scarcity of water resources, as in 1968–1969 and 1978–1984 in the district of La Marina Baja. In this vein, a second key moment is linked to the definitive establishment of La Marina Baja Water Consortium in 1978, when the city that “invented” modern tourism was about to close its doors because of the lack of water. The problem, described as an “ordeal” by Esquembre [7], mobilized Rafael Ferrer, the mayor of Benidorm, and even the central government. An interministerial commission proposed, in the first days of June, “closing Benidorm” to the entry of tourists, diverting them to other coastal enclaves of Spain, in order to avoid “a dreaded and more than likely epidemic, in addition to a host of health risks due to lack of hygiene” [7]. That drought induced the water depletion of the reservoirs and dried up or salinized the wells, giving rise to a critical scenario. Finding solutions different from a mere restriction, in the summer of 1978, tankers distributed water among neighbors, but the most remarkable thing was the speed with which all the administrations worked to achieve it: the government had to seize some boats that were transporting peanut oil to Morocco and they proceeded to clean them to bring water to Benidorm through a 3 km emergency pipeline to the reservoir [8].

Analyzing the drought period of the late 1960s in La Marina Baja, the Guadalest dam did not even reach half of its total capacity annually in the years 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1968. The need to increase urban water resources without compromising the needs of agricultural lands led users to consider the creation of a community of communities [9]. Prior to the 1968 drought and after several meetings in the civil government and the provincial council with the aim of setting up an organization that could provide a solution to the problems, in March 1968 the decision was formalized to establish a consortium for the water supply and sanitation of the municipalities of Alfaz del Pi, Altea, Benidorm, Benisa, Benitachell, Calpe, Gata de Gorgos, Jávea and Teulada [8]. The meeting was held under the chairmanship of the Minister of Public Works and was attended by the Civil Governor, the Director General of Hydraulic Works, the President of the Provincial Council, the government delegate in the Water Basin Authority (Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar) and the mayors of the affected municipalities. During previous years the need to provide the region with an organization to manage water resources, with an integrated approach, had already been spoken of, as reflected in the minutes of the Benidorm City Council, and on 18 November 1967, the Benidorm City Council in full agreed to join the consortium for the supply of drinking water. The consortium agreement was signed on 12 March 1968 [10], even including the possibility to include more neighboring populations. However, on 4 July 1969, in the Benidorm City Council, the determination was made to cover with the consortium only the towns of Altea, Benidorm and Villajoyosa, as the most important of the coast, in addition to Alfaz Pi, La Nucía, Polop, Callosa d’En Sarriá and Finestrat, in order to satisfy the demands for irrigation of the agricultural area of La Marina Baja district and make the legal compensation viable, as the irrigation community of the Canal Bajo del Algar has the right to a flow of 1000 L/s of available water [11]. On 6 August 1969, the full city council agreed to seek all possible resources and began the drilling for the collection of drinking water, hiring a businessman who owned a machine for the development of these works [12].

Years later, the drought from 1978 to 1984 marked the definitive turning point and was the trigger for the implementation of a new good governance body in La Marina Baja, in a sort of instinctive process, in which the institution provided itself with management rules and regulations. This was necessary as increasing the amount of water or developing new infrastructure, which is not always enough to improve the balance of available resources with water requirements. The crisis, due to a lack of water, led to a consolidation of the management model of exchange, agreed and consensual, of natural water for supply, under the ownership of irrigators, for reclaimed water suitable for irrigation. Both the need to be supplied by tankers and to suffer restrictions threatened to create a third-world image far removed from the modernity of the tourist destination par excellence of the province and could generate a reputational crisis that would result in a loss of competitiveness of the tourism sector in international markets. The authorities involved strove to promote a solution that would solve and prevent the situation from repeating itself in the future. It was a question of guaranteeing the urban supply of the tourist centers of La Marina Baja and to remove uncertainties regarding water safety, being also advantageous for the irrigators involved in the agreements described above. Gaviria et al. [13] emphasized this novel and innovative character of Benidorm, which implied potentialities that should be exploited from an ecological perspective, which would place Benidorm “at the forefront of Spanish planning and execution with ecological criteria”.

From a hydrographic perspective, La Marina Baja district is located between the minor basins of the Algar-Guadalest and Amadorio-Sella rivers, a context with a marked shortage of water that presents frequent cyclical periods of drought, generating peaks of crisis [4,14], which made it more challenging to address concerns between 1950 and 1978, a period in which Benidorm became “one of the most spectacular examples of tourism development imaginable: the flagship of tourism in the Valencian Community and the most efficient mass tourism factory on the Spanish coast” [15]. It should be noted that from 1840 onwards and until the fifties of the twentieth century, there was no demographic growth in La Marina Baja district. It was between 1950 and 1991 when this area experienced an extraordinary demographic increase, with a 557% population increase, from 22,845 inhabitants (2726 in Benidorm) to more than 127,000 (75,322 in Benidorm) [8], directly linked to urban and tourism development.

4. The Case Study within the Economic Background

According to the statistical database obtained from Alcaide Inchausti [16], an analysis of the macroeconomic variables explaining interrelationships derived from the hydro-economic model proposed in this research was carried out, from the national to the local scale. The Spanish economy underwent transformations during the second half of the last century, which is the period in which it experienced sustained growth without precedent in its history. From 1960 to 1975, certain phenomena played a very important role in the province of Alicante: the tendency for the Spanish population to locate preferentially in the insular areas and the Mediterranean periphery, the progress of industrialization and the appearance and expansion of tourism as the first national industry. Gross domestic product (GDP) at constant market prices grew by 146.34%, while the resident population increased by 16.41%, which meant that GDP per capita grew by 111.61% in fifteen years, equivalent to a cumulative annual rate of 5.12%. The change in the economic policy of the Franco regime after the application of the Stabilization Plan of 1959 contributed to all this, which meant a process of liberalization and progressive opening towards the exterior and allowed Spain to benefit from the favorable situation that the European economy was experiencing after the Second World War. The expansion of tourism took place, compensating the balance of payments in those years, and was favored by investment in infrastructure, especially highways.

The labor market experienced a profound change (Figure 1). The number of jobs in the primary sector fell by 37.7%, while industry, construction and services registered a joint growth of 41% (53.5% in construction, 45.1% in services and 30.5% in industry). The convergence index with respect to the first 15 countries that today form the European Union (EUR-15), which in 1960 stood at 59.2%, rose to 79.82% in 1975, making Spain a semi-developed country [16].

From 1975 onwards, the political transition together with the energy crisis led to a very significant delay in the process of European convergence, the index of which for the EUR-15 fell to 71.60 in 1985, the same position of 1962. However, the 1985–1995 decade represented a considerable advance for the Spanish economy, with growth higher than that recorded by the European Union as a whole, bringing the convergence index to 80.2% of the EUR-15 [16], as a new expansion took place once democratic institutions were consolidated and the country joined the European Union. During this decade, there was an intense increase in the Spanish resident population as a result of immigration, which led to a notable growth in the employed population while the opening of the Spanish economy to the outside world advanced considerably. At this time, Benidorm was the maximum icon of mass tourism, making it necessary to increase resources for urban supply. The last five years of the 20th century, from 1995 to 2000, was one of the most brilliant periods for the Spanish economy, reaching 85.8% in the 2000 convergence index, driven by the requirements established for access to the euro as a single currency within the European Union [16].

The changes that took place in the Spanish economy between 1950 and 2000 were reflected in the country’s productive structure (Figure 1). Employment in the primary sector went from 49.7% in 1950 to 23.2% in 1975 and 7.3% in 2000, which was offset by increases in the remaining sectors: industrial, construction and, mainly, services, according to the process of tertiarization of the Spanish economy. In terms of GVA (Figure 2), the agricultural sector has reduced its share of the total from 15.3% in 1950 to 4.8% in 2000. The rural exodus was the fact that most influenced economic evolution in the twentieth century, allowing the improvement of total factor productivity, partly achieved through increased industrialization, as well as the expansion of tourism and of all services. According to this trend, the Valencian Region was the third in terms of GDP growth at constant prices between 1930 and 2000 in Spain, only surpassed by the Madrid Region and the Canary Islands.

Singularly, the province of Alicante experienced notable demographic growth from the mid-1950s until 2000, which was greater in intensity than that experienced by the country as a whole; especially in the period 1960–1975, when the annual growth rate of the province was 2.48% compared to 1.02% in Spain (Figure 3). Even in the years of the crisis of the mid-seventies of the twentieth century, Alicante’s demographic dynamics were positive (1.7% compared to 0.83% in Spain). The behavior of employment was also much more positive in the province during the entire period, and the growth rate of the number of jobs in the period 1975–1985 was 0.99% in the province compared to negative figures (−0.59%) in Spain. This means that the economy of Alicante withstood the onslaught of the oil crisis better and that, although its rate of job creation slowed, it did not reverse the positive trend that it had been experiencing, which is a sign of the greater capacity for adaptation and flexibility of the provincial economic fabric (Figure 4).

The importance of tourism in this geographical area should also be taken into account in this “less negative” trajectory. Although the growing trend in the number of passengers at Alicante airport was interrupted from 1979 onwards (Figure 5), from the mid-1980s onwards, the figures recovered strongly.

Specifically, the district of La Marina Baja (

Table 1. Evolution of the population of Spain, province of Alicante and district of La Marina Baja, 1900–1991. Source: own elaboration from [17].

Year	Spain	Alicante Province	La Marina Baja
1900	18,618,086	470,149	38,595
1910	19,995,686	497,616	37,770
1920	21,389,686	512,186	35,483
1930	23,677,794	545,838	34,685
1940	26,015,907	607,562	34,726
1950	27,976,755	634,065	33,296
1960	30,528,539	711,942	33,834
1970	34,040,989	920,105	44,548
1981	37,683,362	1,148,597	55,276
1991	38,872,268	1,334,545	64,274

and Figure 6) was converted from being a district that expelled population until the mid-twentieth century—which was related to the limited opportunities for welfare offered by its traditional economy based on primary sector activities—to a group of municipalities (with the city of Benidorm as the main destination) that gradually became attractive to immigration in the heat of the development of a mass tourism model.

During the period between 1950 and 2000, the economy of Alicante evidenced a strong structural change, going from having an eminently agricultural base, both in terms of employment (43.4% of the total in 1950) and in terms of GVA (16.3% in 1950), to an economy with a diversified economic structure, centered on the tertiary sector (Figure 7).

Thus, the primary sector went from representing more than 43% of employment and more than 16% of GVA in 1950 to reducing its share of employment to less than half in 1975 and to 5% of employment and 3.7% of provincial GVA in 2000. This decline in agricultural and fishing activities has been offset by the prominence of other productive sectors, particularly services, with the percentage of industrial employment remaining stable. Construction has more than doubled the percentage of jobs generated in the province (from 4.4% in 1950 to 9.6% in 1975), also increasing the percentage of GVA from 5.4% in 1950 to 11.5%. But the sector that has increased its share of provincial employment the most has been services; while in 1950 it accounted for a quarter of total employment (25.3%), in 1975 it was already 40% and in 2000 it exceeded 61%. The average annual growth rate of provincial GDP between 1950 and 1975 was 7% and between 1975 and 2000 it was 3.2%, both of which are not insignificant figures.

The Spain of the 1950s presented a backward economic model, predominantly agrarian [18] and from the mid-1950s, the situation became unsustainable due to the internal and external imbalances of the Spanish economy: inflation crisis, lack of foreign reserves to finance the required inputs for the industrialization process and serious problems in the balance of payments. After the 1959 Stabilization Plan, in just one year, the current account balance improved substantially, the state’s accounts were cleaned up and inflation was controlled [19]. Spain was entering the path of growth, industrialization and internationalization of its economy, finally overcoming the long and deep crisis caused by the civil war and above all by the disastrous policies adopted by Franco’s authorities during the post-war period [20]. One of the driving forces behind Spain’s economic development and liberalization to the outside world during the 1960s and 1970s was the sustained boom in tourism, remarkably from abroad. Tourism not only allowed the Spanish economy to advance, but also became an accelerator of social modernization [21].

This period of growing liberalization was directly reflected in the province of Alicante, which became one of the main sun and beach tourist destinations in the country, and proof of this was the notable growth in the number of passengers at Alicante airport: from 8230 in 1960 to 1,253,555 in 1971, mainly after the opening of the new airport in 1967. It can be seen that the number of passengers at Alicante airport has experienced an exponential evolution up to the present day, with some exceptions, such as between 1978 and 1981, when the number of passengers fell from 2,033,008 in 1978 to 1,818,974 passengers in 1981, which was possibly influenced by the reputational crisis of Benidorm—the water supply crisis of 1978 resulted in serious economic losses for Benidorm and damaged its image as a holiday destination [22]— in addition to the effects of the second oil crisis.

Coastal territories were facing the hatching of mass tourism from Europe, which opened a new model of north–south relations [23]. In addition to its environmental and social value on the territory, water proved to have a high economic value, as the management of water resources was decisive for the economic and demographic development of Benidorm and the region: “water management, as an economic good, is an important means to achieve an efficient and equitable use and to promote the conservation and protection of water resources” [24]. At present, almost all the coastal municipalities of La Marina Baja district and the coast of Alicante have tourism as their main economic activity.

Complementary institutional decisions in Benidorm, such as the approval of the first General Urban Development Plan in 1956 and previously the approval of the New Alignment Project for the Levante Beach, were decisive for its subsequent urban, touristic and demographic growth, as exposed in Así será Benidorm, published in 1955, by the visionary mayor of the city, Pedro Zaragoza. During the early years of the 1950s, the city was already experiencing an increase in vacationers [25]. But this first urban development generated serious imbalances between the available resources, not always related to precipitation levels but correlated to a greater extent with increased demand [23], driven by the higher per capita consumption resulting from the new consumption standards associated with urbanization. In the case of Benidorm, unitary consumption went from 80 L/s in 1969 to 600 L/s in 1974 and the evolution of the potable water charged shows a significant growth associated with the urban development (

Table 2. Evolution of drinking water billing charged in Benidorm in current prices, 1964–1975. Source: own elaboration from [13].

Year	Water Billing (Current Pesetas)	Increase Index
1964	2,212,000	1
1965	4,137,000	1.9
1966	5,056,000	2.3
1967	7,254,000	3.3
1968	8,485,000	3.8
1969	11,944,000	5.4
1970	15,501,000	7.0
1971	15,206,000	6.9
1972	20,624,615	9.3
1973	31,837,000	14.4
1974	34,726,325	15.7
1975	40,424,615	18.3

).

5. The Circular Hydro-Economic Model of Water Exchanges in La Marina Baja: Win–Win Solutions

We find a first reference to setting up a consortium to manage water resources in La Marina Baja in 1967 [25], promoted by the Benidorm City Council to supply the city of Benidorm on a regular basis during the summer months, when water demand increases with tourism. But, during the first years of the seventies of the last century, attempts were frustrated by political vicissitudes at the end of the Franco regime. The suitability of forming a consortium of municipalities, which would be beneficiaries of a model of integrated water management in a district with few natural water sources to meet the requirements of strong demographic growth, is based on the fact that the supply of drinking water is qualified in Spanish legislation as a public service of local competence, contained in Article 25 of the Local Government Bases Act, where inter-municipal water consortiums for the supply of water to towns are contemplated, even in the precedent law from 1955 [26].

The choice of the legal formula for creating a consortium is based on cooperation between public agents, as one of the most important aspects that characterize consortia is their flexibility by allowing other types of institutions, beyond the public administrations themselves, to participate in them [27]. In this sense, “the characteristic element of the consortium consists in the fact that its constitution has as a basic presupposition an identical objective situation for all those who participate in it and from which, precisely, derives that common need that it tries to satisfy jointly through its creation” [28].

It was in October 1977 when the consortium was formally constituted, under the legal form of a local associative entity [4,8] with the following objectives: the study of the water supply and sanitation needs of La Marina Baja; the elaboration, in collaboration with the Water Basin Authority (Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar), of the plans for water use and sanitation; the listing of studies, preliminary projects and projects to satisfy the water needs of the district; the application for concessions or authorizations for water supply and wastewater treatment; the execution of works and installations for water treatment, evacuation, purification, discharge and use of wastewater; and the coordination of the consortium’s own activities, as well as those of the town councils, with the Ministry responsible for water matters.

Among its most relevant activities are the collection and regulation of surface and groundwater, the integrated management of surface and groundwater resources for different uses, the reuse of wastewater and the exchange of natural groundwater for reclaimed wastewater through agreements, a pillar on which the success of the consortium’s own water management is based. The rights to agricultural water use concessions were reoriented to guarantee all users the supply of the resources necessary for irrigation and for supplying the municipalities in the consortium. Long before reclaimed water gained prominence in the heat of circular economy in the field of water management, La Marina Baja had already made evident the need to give more than one use to the available water resources, responding to scarcity and making the resource an element of environmental, social and economic opportunity. It has been necessary to wait until the second decade of the 21st century for the European Union to institutionally incorporate circularity in the field of water [29].

In most places in the world that combine scarcity and periods of severe drought with increasing demand there are water governance issues and critical challenges that are still unresolved, as reflected in a European communication [30]. In this context, the consortium’s management model becomes relevant: effective in solving scarcity problems, in guaranteeing users by eliminating uncertainties in relation to economic activities and promoting environmentally sustainable behavior in line with circular economy. Social trends and legislative action establish that the transition to a circular economy is an opportunity to transform our economy and make it more sustainable, contribute to climate objectives and the conservation of global resources, create jobs at the local level and generate competitive advantages for Europe [3]. The management model in La Marina Baja has made it possible to protect typical ecosystems of the cultural landscape of a traditionally agricultural region, as well as the benefits for the preservation of biodiversity.

If we delve into the history and origins of La Marina Baja Water Consortium, and the reasons that drove the search for solutions, we find a commitment to dialogue, agreements and decisions, typical of institutional economy, given that “institutions allow to resolve the tensions posed by human cooperation” [2]. Under the leadership of the Benidorm City Council, decisions were taken by organizations such as the Provincial Council of Alicante, the Government of Spain, the Water Basin Authority and the other affected municipalities, as well as the traditional irrigators of the area, who had held concessions for irrigation use since long before 1970. As was demonstrated years later with the success of CAMB, “without appropriate institutions, policies will not work; without appropriate policies, institutions will not work” [20]. Having the same needs morally obliges all the participants of the consortium to have a common interest that ends up having a notable repercussion for social interest and this results in the liability to proportionally sustain the burdens by all the actors participating in the consortium, all of them being co-participants in the decisions taken [28]. Consequently, this is an integrated, solidarity-based, participatory, and financially co-responsible management model, financed according to the return generated.

The consortium was constituted on the principles accepted in IWRM, such as management unity, the recognition of individual stakeholders and the capacity for interrelation between them. The management body gives a social dimension to water management, providing transparency in decision making, committing financing from all those who participate and incorporating cost compensation and a fair redistribution of the water resources managed. Also, it guarantees the satisfaction of demand in terms of quantity and quality of water as an economic value, in the terms established by the principles of the Dublin Declaration [31]. This Declaration states that “water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good”, highlighting the urgent need to give responsible participation to all users, planners and decision-makers.

The linkages of problems associated with water to other facets of society require a holistic approach, as Biswas [32] points out when referring to IWRM, where the participation of the actors involved (local, provincial, and national administrations, civil society and the private sector) is promoted, responding to each one of the problems and needs that could arise in the territory. Good governance was not only adopted by the institutions, but all the actors also had a relevant role, from the users themselves or the public authorities, to the technicians who carried out the actions. Among the roles of the technicians, the figure of José Ramón García Antón should be highlighted: García Antón was chief engineer of the Benidorm City Council at the end of the seventies and was later appointed counselor of the regional government, assuming management of, among other departments, environment and water in the government of the Valencian Region. García Antón, was aware of the problems that afflicted the district and Benidorm and was a visionary who placed water at the center of his policies for the province of Alicante and, in particular, for the success of a tourism icon like Benidorm. He pointed out the need to anticipate crisis scenarios, such as droughts, to act on the reuse of wastewater and to complement the dwindling local resources with the contribution of foreign resources: the axes that form the backbone of the successful response to the area’s problems.

Most of the groundwater in the area had concessions for agricultural use, and the holders of these concessions, all of which were granted before 1970, were irrigation communities in the district. Since the second half of the fifties, water swap agreements have been a constant in the articulation of the water management model in La Marina Baja. The agreements allow the exchange of rights that the irrigators had on their concessions on natural waters in order to ensure water for urban water supply, although these agreements have not always been fruitful. In fact, the incidence of the 1969 drought caused a discrepancy between the parties which, although it meant the theoretical rupture of the agreements, did not prevent the Canal Bajo del Algar from continuing to be “the aqueduct that the Benidorm City Council needed to receive water from the Guadalest Reservoir” [21].

These first agreements between irrigators and municipalities contemplated the transfer of the use of natural waters to supply the coastal municipalities in exchange for financial compensation and/or as investments, and were recorded in [10]. They included the collaboration contract for the execution of works, signed by the town council and the Canal Bajo del Algar irrigators community, dated 3 January 1967, for the construction of the necessary connection infrastructure. The agreement was defended by the councilor responsible for the drinking water service on the grounds of the need to guarantee the supply during the summer season, given the insufficient reserves in the Guadalest reservoir, which made it necessary to contract hours of water from private wells. The result of the exchange enabled that “the supply of the population has been totally regular”, as recorded in [10]. Collaboration between irrigators and municipalities that needed water to meet the growing demand for water supply was a constant and existed prior to the creation of the consortium. In 1970, a meeting was held in Alicante between representatives of the Provincial Council, the Water Basin Authority and the municipalities affected by the drought of 1969 to establish water flows and the financial contributions of municipalities (Altea, Alfaz del Pi, Benidorm, Finestrat, Villajoyosa, Polop, La Nucía and Callosa d’En Sarriá) [13].

In the case of La Marina Baja Water Consortium, which is technically and geographically described in [4,33], the voluntary cession by irrigators of natural water in exchange for reclaimed water is a sort of “informal” or asystematic water market [4,27], that has been operating on the basis of collaboration agreements that have allowed exchanges in a peaceful and efficient manner for decades [34,35]. These swap agreements with irrigators for supply in exchange for reclaimed water were described as “picturesque” and “useful” by Van Looy [36] and encompass the historic agreement between Beniardá and Benidorm, which initially had no compensation, but was later made in exchange for financing Beniardá’s festivities, maintained throughout more than 40 years.

Institutional decisions marked the future of water management, already before the constitution of the consortium, during the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, when the Ministry of Public Works recognized that the district was affected by a water deficit and, consequently, in order to alleviate it in 1973, granted in favor of the Water Basin Authority (Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar) the reservation of 1500 m³/day of surplus water from the Algar river for the supplies of Altea, Alfaz del Pi, Benidorm, Finestrat, Polop, La Nucía, Vilajoyosa and Callosa d’En Sarriá [8]. To this concession, 1000 m³/day were added once the consortium was formed. Since then, the consortium has the reserve of two water uses, one of 7 hm³/year and the other of 11 hm³/year, registered in the water registry of the Water Basin Authority, by the resolution of 6 June 2011. These reserves of use respected the rights of irrigators, titles prior to 1970, although the use was subordinated to the release of natural surface water, assigned to irrigation, which is replaced by reclaimed water. In addition to these uses of surplus surface water, there is the contribution of the Beniardá, Sella and Benimantell groundwater wells (Figure 8).

The use of all available technologies allowed the reuse of wastewater, increasing the resource supply. A key piece of infrastructure for carrying out the consortium’s objectives was the Benidorm wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) which began in 1982, even before reused waters were regulated at a national scale, which occurred in 2007. The plant implemented a tertiary water treatment and ultrafiltration system in 2007, complemented by reverse osmosis, generating high-quality regenerated water for agriculture—a pioneer solution for a WWTP, without which the salinity intolerance of most crops would have prevented treated water to be used. Its strategic location in Sierra Helada, at an altitude of more than 140 m, meant that there were fewer odors derived from the treatment process and that, by gravity, the reclaimed water could be sent to the irrigation communities that were to receive the resources. This WWTP, with a capacity of 25,000 m³/day, treats the sludge with a complex process of anaerobic digestion, which allows its subsequent agricultural use and the generation of biogas together with cogeneration to supply electricity to the plant itself. The Villajoyosa and Altea WWTPs complement the supply of water for irrigation (Figure 8).

Historically, the water supply guarantee of La Marina Baja Water Consortium is based on three fundamental water systems: the Algar-Guadalest and Amadorio-Sella rivers, and the pioneer reuse of treated wastewater. Nevertheless, over the last few years, external desalination resources have come to complement the system. The search for new exogenous supplies has been undertaken since 1998—when a water crisis similar to that in 1978 occurred—by developing the Rabasa–Fenollar–Amadorio pipeline which enabled the partial use of the infrastructure of the Tajo–Segura aqueduct to bring water from the Alarcón reservoir (located in the province of Cuenca, but in the Júcar River Basin Authority) to the Amadorio reservoir. The further contribution of new external resources received a boost in 2009, when the Ministry of the Environment and Rural and Marine Affairs approved the project for the construction of the Mutxamel desalination plant (located out of the area of study, southward of the district), which has been used since 2015 in periods of extreme scarcity, taking advantage of the Rabasa–Fenollar–Amadorio pipeline. These management practices together with the current outcomes in technical terms are described in detail in the work of Berenguer Ponsoda [37]. Previously, the expectations placed on the Júcar–Vinalopó water transfer (a potential exogenous new resource for the district) were left behind, as a political decision on changing the water intake point implied a very poor quality of the transferred water, which would have required a prior potabilization process with a resulting unfeasible cost for urban consumption [38].

At present, the population served by the consortium is 159,000 inhabitants on a continuous basis, which in the summer season can increase to between 234,000 and 600,000 inhabitants [4]. Therefore, the axis on which the success of La Marina Baja Water Consortium will be based on in the future will continue to be the agreement that allows the exchange of natural water for reclaimed wastewater, i.e., the use of quality groundwater for supply, in exchange for the use of reclaimed water for irrigation in the district, together with the granting of compensation, such as storage and operation infrastructure, as well as financial compensation to the transferors of quality resources. The conceptual model is shown in Figure 9:

Consciously or fortuitously, during the years prior to the creation of the consortium, an integrated water management system was forged in response to the equation of water scarcity versus increased demand. This gave rise to patterns of behavior that, to a large extent, anticipate a model of institutional economics, which fits the definition of Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom. In this regard, it should be noted that Ostrom [39] challenged the idea that individuals act in their own self-interest to the point of destroying a shared resource. With numerous field studies, she demonstrated that local communities, when faced with shared problems, develop governance models for sustainable resource management and that institutions provide a better response to the challenges they face with inclusive policies. For his part, Oliver Williamson [40] argues that the key insight is that the value of conflict resolution depends on two main factors: first, there is no point in being able to resolve conflicts that never arise. Accordingly, there was a need to respond to the strong demand for water resources arising from the boom in tourism in Benidorm, and especially in times of drought as indicated during the years 1968–1969 and 1978–1984. Secondly, as Williamson [40] points out, there is no reason to be able to resolve conflicts if the disagreement has no cost. In this case, the cost would have been catastrophic for the interests of Benidorm, and for the district as a whole, since Benidorm acted as a growth pole for the rest of the coastal municipalities.

Water was considered a common good that could be exchanged between those who had the administrative concession to use it and those who potentially wanted to acquire that right in a sort of water market, with a broad historical tradition in the area [41]. All stakeholders have gained from the shared management agreements within the framework of the hydro-economic model described above, which conferred water an economic, social and environmental value for the benefit of La Marina Baja as a whole, generating contexts of opportunity. After the historical process described from the 1950s, an IWRM system was set up in a territory with water scarcity, which suffered periods of severe drought and which was experiencing urban and demographic growth derived from mass tourism, preserving the cultural landscape and generating an ecosystem of joint wealth, achieving symbiosis between apparently opposing areas—coast versus interior, tourism versus agriculture, urban versus rural—where all the parties involved satisfied their demands. This underlined the continued commitment to the preservation of agriculture, environmental sustainability, conservation of biodiversity and the maintenance of a unique cultural landscape.

During the 1950s and 1960s, IWRM become attractive for developing nations for their modernization, with river basin authorities established in many countries of the Global South, but by the 1970s, concerns over the ‘engineering’ paradigm started to emerge, due to its technocratic nature and environmental impacts [42,43]. Nevertheless, one of the main advantages of IWRM models is the ability to accommodate local culture, norms or traditions, as a development process towards adaptive solutions to water-related problems, thereby preserving natural resources and ecosystems along with a wide level of participation, users’ representation and voluntary local organization with guaranteed water resources [43,44]. Some success stories can be found in the Lower Jordan Rift Valley (Near East) or in the USA, with holistic approaches including the use of different sources of water (such as natural groundwater or surface, reclaimed, desalinated and water for artificial recharge of aquifers); understanding the interactions between water, environment and society; and being extremely sensitive to national, political, cultural and socioeconomic conditions [44,45].

Moreover, the case study could be compared with other significant examples in the world that have implemented an IWRM model, as explained by Dardati [46] for Israel or Australia. Israel is a country with water scarcity, whose management is carried out centrally through the Water Authority based on permanent incorporation of advanced technology and infrastructure. The case of Australia exemplifies a decentralized administration where, under Australia’s 1901 Constitution, states have the power to allocate water resources [47]; nevertheless, there are discussions about the degree and nature of privatization in relation to water, considering the concept of public ownership rather than querying the initial vesting of the resource in the state [48]. In the 1990s, Australia began reforms to address environmental impacts, in which the figure of an independent administration appears to coordinate the management of the water resources [49]. One of the most important changes was the relocation of water resources to the most agriculturally productive places, analogous to Benidorm with its tourism boom. As in the La Marina Baja model, public institutions, users and legislation are empowered to be a management instrument, according to the principles of institutional economics, as adequate governance can respond to the problems of dry or semi-arid territories through a holistic IWRM approach, making it possible to face the most important challenges of societies, such as environmental, social and economic sustainability.

6. Conclusions

This paper demonstrates that the historical process that took place in La Marina Baja district, in the province of Alicante (Spain), resulted in a successful model of water governance, which reached its greatest success with the formal constitution of La Marina Baja Water Consortium in 1977. Two historical moments should be emphasized with regard to water as the main resource factor in the economic progress, environmental development and social cohesion of this district, and, particularly, of its main city Benidorm. Firstly, the events of the early seventeenth century, when Beatriz de Fajardo ordered the construction of the canal popularly known as Séquia Mare, which allowed the repopulation of the coastal municipalities of the district. Secondly, the 1978 drought and the need to bring water by tankers to Benidorm marked a turning point in the city known as an icon of international tourism in Spain. Tourism had an unprecedented influence on the awakening of the Spanish economy; it opened Spain to the world and allowed, with carry-over effects, the takeoff of the Spanish economy in other areas such as services, construction and related industries.

In these vibrant economic scenarios faced by the area of study—in which periods of severe drought were combined with structural shortages—the governance model that led to the creation of CAMB, based on integrated water resources management, was the basis for achieving a balance between demand and available resources. Likewise, there was a clear influence of the principles of institutional economics in the case studied, on account of the mobilization and channeling of resources by different administrations working together, launching equitable management rules and integrating the participation of all stakeholders in decision making. The central axis of this successful model of governance is the exchange of natural water for reclaimed water. Natural water is transferred by irrigators to consumers in the primary phase of coastal municipalities, while reclaimed water is transferred to irrigators through advanced purification infrastructure and technologies, making possible the coexistence of economic activities as different as agriculture and tourism.

Finally, it is concluded that this governance model can be applied to other locations with arid territories and similar characteristics from an economic, geographic and climatic point of view, as some studies have shown that the evolution of legal and institutional frameworks of urban water services in Spain could positively impact on water management in developing countries [50]. Largely, water resource planning has been separated from land-use planning [51] and opportunities for explicitly linking planning policies to water availability in Europe were unexamined until the planning framework issued by Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2000, establishing a framework for community action in the field of water policy [52]. La Marina Baja was well ahead of its time by establishing a direct relationship between water and territory since the 1960s, an experience which significantly contributes to a management model that could be applied elsewhere. There are countries with scarce water resources and periods of severe drought which have traditionally based their economy on activities such as agriculture and are now experiencing the arrival and expansion of developing economic activities. This could be the case in other Mediterranean locations such as Egypt, Tunisia or Morocco, where many urban water management problems may be a consequence of the absence of an effective integrated approach where water management and land use have not been jointly planned [43,53,54]; such imported strategies, summarized in Figure 9, would be able to address increasing scarcity, gaps in access, legislative changes, lack of infrastructure or new technologies and population growth. However, the consequences of climate change may force us to redefine IWRM models, on which further research is required.