A wildlife park is not where you expect to hear about wastewater, yet on Thursday 22 October in La Lajita, in the municipality of Pájara, that was the subject. Oasis Wildlife Fuerteventura hosted experts from universities, research centres and companies linked to the European Natalie project, who came to see how its natural water treatment works.
Natalie is an initiative under the Horizon programme that develops nature-based solutions to make territories more resilient to climate change. According to Canarias7 it involves 42 European partners, has a budget of 15 million euros and runs until August 2028. The Canarian side has been known for some time: in 2023 RTVC and the University of La Laguna described it with case studies in Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura, including artificial recharge of aquifers with reclaimed water and natural solutions for floods and torrential rain.
In Fuerteventura the idea has a geographic reason. In 2023 RTVC presented it this way: an arid island where rainfall will decline and become sporadic, and where natural treatment could yield good-quality water to maintain wetlands or recharge aquifers. It could also help livestock and wildlife, for example by irrigating fodder or filling drinking troughs. The Oasis Wildlife system, installed a few years ago, is presented as a practical example.
The park’s CEO, Guacimara Cabrera, said: “Llevamos años apostando por la depuración natural”, roughly “we have been betting on natural treatment for years”. She added that meetings like this allow knowledge to be exchanged and the system improved, so the operator gets something out of them too.
The rest is unclear, and that is a lot. The Canarias7 article gives no volumes of water treated or reused, no installation costs and no names of participants. CSIC and the University of La Laguna appear among its tags, but the text does not confirm they attended. Without numbers there is no way to say whether a model like this can leave a private park and enter the island’s everyday water management.
Natalie proposes something different from producing more water: reusing what already exists better. The project has almost two years left, a reasonable time to turn a visit into comparable figures. If they are published, they will be the real news.
