Water in the Colombian countryside: where it comes from and what it needs

Water decides whether a country house can be built at all, and it is almost always left until last. People treat it as a construction item — drill, pump, store — when before any of that it is a permitting matter, with an application, a site visit and a formal decision.

And one sentence circulates about that process which is simply wrong: "every country house needs a water concession". It is wrong in four separate situations, and knowing which one is yours can change months of your calendar.

The four sources

Water for a house in the countryside comes from one of four places, and each has its own regime. This is not an academic classification: it is what decides which document you need and which office issues it.

The water concession: who grants it and how long it lasts

A concession is the permit to draw water that belongs to the public domain. The governing rule is Decreto 1076 de 2015, the single consolidated decree for the environmental sector, which absorbed the older Decreto 1541 de 1978.

It is granted by the corporación autónoma regional, and that sits in the statute that created those bodies: among their functions is "granting permits and concessions for forest use, concessions for the use of surface and groundwater".

Ten years, not fifty

The order of priority, when there is not enough water

In catchments under pressure the authority does not allocate on a first-come basis. There is a statutory order of precedence, and domestic use comes first:

That is good news for a dwelling and bad news for an irrigation or leisure project in the same catchment. It is worth knowing which of the two categories your plans fall into.

What the application asks for

• —The applicant’s name, the source the water will be drawn from and the property to be served.
• —The quantity of water requested, in litres per second. That is a design figure, not an estimate: it has to have been calculated.
• —The intake, diversion, conveyance and surplus-return arrangements.
• —Any easements needed, and the term applied for.
• —A certificate from the Oficina de Registro de Instrumentos Públicos, the land registry, on ownership of the property, or proof of possession or tenancy.
• —Written authorisation from the owner, where the applicant merely holds the land.

The four cases where no concession is needed

Here is what almost nobody explains properly, and what can save you an entire procedure. There are four distinct situations, resting on different rules.

1. Drinking, bathing and washing in a natural watercourse

2. Rainwater that falls and stays on the property

Rainwater harvesting is therefore the only source that does not begin with a procedure. And one rule works in its favour: the statute on efficient water use obliges the bodies that issue permits to require that the study of supply sources include the rainwater available, and that its use be adopted where this is technically and economically feasible.

3. Groundwater for domestic use on your own property

4. Scattered rural dwellings

This is the broadest exception and the least known, because it does not sit in the water decree but in a national development plan statute. Article 279 of Ley 1955 de 2019 provided that such use be entered in the Registro de Usuarios del Recurso Hídrico, the register of water users, and that this entry replaces the concession. Decreto 1210 de 2020 implemented it and carried it into Decreto 1076.

What counts as domestic use was set out in three limbs: drinking and preparing food; personal hygiene and cleaning; and farming, livestock and aquaculture use for the subsistence of those living in the dwelling. The entry, moreover, is completed by the environmental authority itself, not by the owner.

Boreholes and shallow wells: the permit that comes before drilling

This is the expensive mistake in the whole subject, and it is made in that order: people drill first and ask afterwards.

On top of everything any concession needs, the application asks for things that force you to have a contractor before you can even file: the name and registration number of the drilling company, the specifications of its equipment, the drilling method, a work plan, the hydrogeological characteristics of the area and a list of the other groundwater abstractions already existing nearby.

Once the drilling is done, three duties remain that nobody budgets for and that come from the rule rather than from an official’s judgement:

• —A report for each well drilled, within sixty working days of the end of the permit, with its location in coordinates, a stratigraphic log for every well, whether or not it found water, and physicochemical and bacteriological analysis.
• —A pumping test before the well is used at all. The rule is blunt: no abstraction may begin without one having been carried out first. And the well must end up fitted with a meter, a pressure-gauge connection and a sampling point.
• —A prior permit to seal a well. Nobody may go ahead with plugging one without authorisation from the environmental authority. An abandoned well is not simply filled in.

The village water system: the simplest option, where it exists

An acueducto veredal — a village-level water system, usually run by the community itself — is not an informal arrangement between neighbours. It is a public utility provider. The utilities statute contemplates it expressly as "organisations authorised under this Law to provide public utility services in smaller municipalities, in rural areas and in specific urban zones".

That has consequences in both directions. Upwards, the system needs its own water concession — the statute requires those providing public utility services to obtain concession contracts in order to use water — and it must register with the utilities regulator and the sector’s supervisory authority.

Downwards, and this is the part that concerns you: if the system holds its concession in good order, you do not need one of your own. What you need is the provider’s document. By some margin, it is the shortest route.

How this connects to the building permit

There is a widespread imprecision here worth undoing. The "certificate of immediate service availability" that everyone names belongs to the urbanisation permit, which is an urban instrument. On rural land the requirement is worded differently and points straight at the environmental permit:

That paragraph belongs to the subdivision permit. But the underlying condition reaches the building permit as well: the article setting the general conditions for granting permits on rural and suburban rural land applies "to subdivision and building permits", and repeats the same requirement to evidence environmental permits where supply is self-provided.

When water decides the permit: the Jamundí case

This is not hypothetical. In Jamundí there are permits suspended by a court judgment, and the test for the suspension is not geographic but one of water availability: what matters is whether the property has guaranteed supply. It is set out, with the ruling and its exceptions, in building in Jamundí. I will not repeat it here.

What is worth drawing out is the general lesson: water availability can be the first document of a project, ahead of the first drawing. That is not the quirk of one municipality; it is what happens when a catchment reaches its limit.

The water that leaves: a warning and a pointer

Settling where the water comes in is half the problem. The other half is where it goes, and that deserves an article of its own. Two points here only, so that neither is misreported to you.

First: the general rule on discharge permits is very wide. It reaches every person whose activity generates discharges to surface water, marine water or the soil, and the article sets no volume threshold below which it ceases to apply.

And the scattered rural dwelling exception reappears here: individual sanitation solutions designed to the parameters of the sector’s technical regulation require no permit for discharge to the soil, though they must still be registered. Subject to the same paragraph 2 limits we saw earlier.

The order worth working in

1. 1Ask whether there is a village water system and whether its concession is current. If the answer is yes, you have saved yourself the rest.
2. 2Ask the environmental authority, in writing and naming the property, what it requires in order to supply a dwelling there. It is free, and it is the answer that governs.
3. 3Find out whether your case fits the scattered rural dwelling exception, and confirm in writing that the authority does not regard your project as a country subdivision.
4. 4If you are going to drill, get the permit before hiring the rig, and expect to need the drilling company identified before you can even apply.
5. 5Include rainwater harvesting in the study of supply sources, even where it is not the main one. It is the only source that starts without a procedure.
6. 6Settle water and sanitation at the concept design stage, not at the finishes stage. They decide where the house can stand as much as the soil survey does.

Anyone who asks these six questions before buying the land avoids the surprise. Anyone who asks them once the drawings exist does not — and sometimes the surprise is that the house cannot be supplied where it has been drawn. Before all this comes the other conversation, about title and access: what to check before signing for rural land.