The Diputación de Sevilla has completed a province-wide water network digitalization programme covering 23 municipalities that operate outside the province’s major water consortia, committing more than 500,000 euros to build the technical foundation for remote management, automated meter reading, and early leak detection across rural Andalusia.
A Baseline Built From the Ground Up
The programme, executed over more than twelve months by Tragsatec – a state-owned technical and consulting subsidiary of the Grupo Tragsa – involved a field survey effort described by provincial authorities as unprecedented in scale for the territory. Teams covered over 25,000 kilometres on the ground, conducted 135 field visits, and inventoried more than 1,100 kilometres of distribution network.
The technical audit catalogued 78 water intakes, 68 storage reservoirs, 80 pumping stations, 42 drinking water treatment facilities, more than 7,000 isolation valves, and 13 pressure-reducing valves. Each asset was georeferenced using uniform technical criteria across all 23 municipalities, producing a consistent and comparable picture of the supply chain from abstraction point to final connection.
What the Geodatabase Contains
The output of the programme is a geographic information system database exceeding 34 gigabytes in size, accompanied by a diagnostic report running to approximately 2,500 pages. The system allows administrators to visualise every network element on a map – pipes, reservoirs, abstraction points – alongside detailed attribute data, and to trace interconnections between assets to understand how the system functions as a whole.
The geodatabase enables planners to consult precise data, identify potential failure points, and prioritise investment decisions based on technical evidence rather than anecdotal reporting. Provincial officials described the dataset as an indispensable prerequisite for any future step toward centralised control or remote leak detection, rather than an end point in itself.
Drought Risk Drives the Urgency
The broader context for the investment is Andalusia’s recent and severe drought cycle, which affected the region in the years immediately preceding this project. Sevilla’s reservoirs and aquifers now stand at approximately 95 percent of capacity following a wet period, a situation provincial leadership has framed as a narrow window to build resilience before the next cycle arrives.
The provincial president positioned digitalization as part of a wider public water strategy, noting that all water systems in the province of Sevilla operate under full public ownership – a structure he described as a key asset in ensuring equitable distribution of water across both urban and rural communities. The long-term ambition articulated at the announcement was the creation of a unified large-scale public water utility for the province.
The 23 Municipalities
The project covers municipalities that are not affiliated with any of the province’s five established water consortia: Aguadulce, Alanís, Almadén de la Plata, Badolatosa, Burguillos, Casariche, Castilblanco de los Arroyos, Cazalla de la Sierra, Constantina, Coripe, Estepa, Gilena, Guadalcanal, La Puebla de los Infantes, Las Navas de la Concepción, Lora de Estepa, Lora del Río, Montellano, Pedrera, Peñaflor, Pruna, San Nicolás del Puerto, and Villaverde del Río. These are predominantly smaller rural towns with limited administrative capacity to undertake this kind of technical survey independently.
A Staging Ground for Telemanagement
Provincial officials were careful to frame the completed work as a foundation rather than a finished product. The geodatabase creates the conditions under which telemanagement infrastructure – remote sensors, automated meters, and centralised monitoring platforms – can eventually be deployed with spatial precision and network understanding that would otherwise be absent.
This approach mirrors a model being applied at scale elsewhere in Spain. Kurrant has previously reported on Soria Province’s deployment of 422 real-time water sensors as part of the SOAR programme – a project covering 121 municipalities under the national PERTE Digitalización del Ciclo del Agua framework, backed by EU NextGenerationEU funds. That programme similarly relies on prior network inventory and georeferencing to guide sensor placement and enable leak sectorisation.
Spain’s water-digitalization PERTE, as Kurrant has covered in the context of Veolia’s positioning across 17 strategic projects, provides nearly two billion euros in public investment structured around basin-authority digitalization, urban water cycle modernisation, and capacity-building in smaller municipalities – precisely the type of context the Sevilla Diputación is now working to enter.
Depopulation as a Policy Driver
A dimension of the initiative that extends beyond technical infrastructure is its framing as a demographic retention tool. Rural municipalities across southern Spain face persistent population decline, and the provincial president made an explicit connection between the quality of public utilities – water supply reliability, consistency, and pricing – and the capacity of small communities to retain residents.
The programme explicitly targets equal service quality across all 23 municipalities, addressing what has historically been a disparity between towns integrated into large consortium systems and those managing their own standalone networks with fewer resources.
Next Steps
With the baseline established, the Diputación de Sevilla has indicated the intent to progressively integrate the 23 municipalities into one of the province’s five existing public water systems. The geodatabase and diagnostic report will serve as the technical input for procurement and investment planning in subsequent phases, including the introduction of telecontrol, automated leak detection, and remote metering infrastructure.
The phased approach – catalogue first, instrument second – reflects an increasingly standard methodology in the European water digitalization landscape, where accurate network knowledge is a prerequisite for effective deployment of IoT-based monitoring tools.
