Water and environment: constitutional legal framework of water matters in Spain, nowadays

Abstract

When we deal with water in Spain, we must consider that such a natural resource - essential for life, the citizen and, in general, for the whole of society, its activities, growth and development-, it´s not recognized as an autonomous and independent right in any of the legal texts in force in the national territory, not even in the 1978 Constitution. However, as will be discussed in the following article, within the Spanish constitutional framework, if you have an environmental right through which the "hypothetical right to water" would be preached that every Spanish citizen should correspond (in the way that some international and community texts claim for the whole of humanity). In the same way, in the 1978 Constitution, is established for each right and freedom, a mechanism aimed at protecting them, through which it was understood as sufficient to insert or include the constitutionally recognized environmental right, in the category of protected rights with the smallest possible constitutional ranges. The consequence of this circumstance has led to the juxtaposition of a series of environmental claims based on invocations of rights included in the Constitution that, even if they have a different condition, have a greater degree of protection within the ordering.