Water Supply on the Peninsula: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 01:45, 2 November 2026

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💧 Water Supply on the Peninsula

Water on the Santa Elena Peninsula comes almost entirely from outside the province.

Water on the Santa Elena Peninsula comes almost entirely from outside the province. The peninsula gets about 300 mm of rain a year, its rivers run only in the rainy season, and Salinas has no groundwater at all. Every tap in Santa Elena, La Libertad and Salinas depends on one chain of canals and pumps that brings water from the Daule River in Guayas.

How the water gets here

Step	What happens
1. Daule River	The Daule-Peripa dam upstream regulates the river.
2. Daule pumping station, canals and tunnel	27 km + 4 km of canal and a tunnel of almost 7 km carry water to the Chongón reservoir. Working since 1999.
3. Chongón reservoir	About 280 million m³ of storage.
4. Chongón pumping station	Lifts the water 62 m over the coastal hills; 9.2 m³/s installed, only about half in use.
5. Canal Chongón–Sube y Baja and the Río Bejuco	Part of the trip runs in a natural riverbed. At the Bejuco weir, the Chongón–San Vicente branch splits off to irrigate the north (Las Balsas valley and the San Vicente reservoir).
6. El Azúcar reservoir	Built in the 1960s. Its water surface shrank from 660 ha in 1998 to 158 ha in 2016 because of silt and water hyacinth.
7. Canal Azúcar–Río Verde and San Rafael reservoirs	Raw water is pumped from here to the treatment plant. About 13,000 ha of farms are irrigated along the canals, 92% of it private land.
8. Atahualpa treatment plant (Aguapen EP)	Designed for 940 l/s (about 81,000 m³ a day); it actually produces less (see below). Treatment: chlorination, coagulation, settling, filtering and a final chlorination.
9. Central reservoir (12,000 m³)	Lines run to the Salinas and Santa Elena tanks (5,000 m³ each), to Barbasco in Punta Blanca, and to Anconcito.
10. Your tap	Santa Elena, La Libertad, Salinas, José Luis Tamayo, Anconcito, Atahualpa, Ancón, El Tambo, Prosperidad and villages along the road to Ayangue.

If any link fails — a pump, a canal or the Atahualpa plant — all three cities lose water at once.

Who runs it

Raw water and irrigation: built by Cedegé and run by Senagua since 2009 (now part of the Environment and Water Ministry).
Drinking water, sewers and wastewater: Aguapen EP, the joint public company of the three municipalities. It began as a private company on 14 December 1999 and became a municipal public company in 2012–2013. It has more than 100,000 customers. Bills can be paid as described in Paying Utilities; the water bill now also includes the rubbish collection fee.

Did you know…?

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How many homes are connected

Santa Elena canton: 89.1% of homes (2022). By locality, coverage of the network ranges from 75% of the city's area down to 45% in Punta Blanca and 30% in Villingota.
Salinas: share of each parish's area with piped water — Salinas 72%, José Luis Tamayo 76%, Anconcito 45%.
Supply is intermittent at the edges of the network and can be rationed in droughts and in the busy high season (December–April). Many residents drink bottled water.

Losses and shortages

The plant's design capacity and what it actually delivers are very different. Figures reported locally in 2026:

The Atahualpa plant has produced about 800 l/s since 1999, roughly 70,000 m³ a day.
About 50% of that is lost: old asbestos-cement mains leak, and water is taken through illegal connections. That leaves about 35,000 m³ a day billed by Aguapen EP.
This supplies about 45% of the population, often only for some hours a day. The other 55% depend on well water.
Storage: the Salinas tank (5,000 m³) now has a new 3,000 m³ tank beside it, for 8,000 m³ in all. Across the province, more than 20,000 m³ of tank capacity stands empty for lack of water.
Doubling the plant's output has been proposed; one estimate puts the cost at about US$10 million.
On 8 September 2026 a fire, attributed to poor maintenance, burned the electrical connection feeding Aguapen's plants. Since then CNEL has supplied power to the San Rafael and Atahualpa plants by a direct connection that bypasses the normal transformers and switching equipment.

The north coast is different

The Ruta del Spondylus villages are not on this network. Community water boards (juntas de agua) pump groundwater:

Junta Regional de Olón: Olón, Curia, San José, Las Nuñez, La Entrada
Junta Regional de Manglaralto: Montañita, Río Chico, Cadeate, San Antonio, Libertador Bolívar, Manglaralto
Junta Regional de Valdivia: San Pedro, Valdivia, Sinchal, Barcelona, Carrizal
Dos Mangas has its own board; Colonche parish has several boards and about a dozen small committees.
Inland villages such as Julio Moreno and Sacachún depend on tanker trucks.

Heavy pumping is lowering the water table and its quality. New modular treatment plants for Colonche–Palmar–Ayangue and the Manglaralto villages have been proposed.

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