The Tins River, punished like so many others by invasive species, pollution and urban planning blunders, has become the first in Spain to have its rights officially recognized. The municipal corporation of Outes (A Coruña) has unanimously approved an institutional declaration that establishes for this channel 10 rights and 14 commitments of residents so that they are respected. Before being blessed in the plenary hall, the document was agreed upon throughout Outes. With 6,200 inhabitants, everyone from the retirement club to the school children has been involved in rescuing the river. Everyone has unanimously agreed on an environmental transformation for Tins with an eye toward the next 20 years and the challenges of climate change. It includes cleaning, urban reorganization, the elimination of invasive species, the planting of native trees and the search for solutions to the flooding suffered by the town.
As a subject of rights, the Tins de Outes follows in the wake of other rivers in the world such as the Whanganui in New Zealand, the Ganges in India, the Buriganga in Bangladesh or the Atrato in Colombia. It also drinks from the spirit of the law that the Congress of Deputies approved in 2022 to grant legal personality to the Mar Menor lagoon in Murcia. In the Galician case, explains Alba Quintela, a local government councilor who heads the Commitment for Outes party, the declaration of rights is “symbolic” because it is not accompanied by an ordinance that establishes sanctions if it is not complied with. But “the intention,” the councilor emphasizes, is that its content “marks environmental policies.” “It is not binding in the legal sense but it is binding in political terms,” says Joám Evans, spokesperson for the Montescola Foundation, one of the promoters of the initiative.
The Tins bill of rights is born from a collective dream. Over the past three decades, Outes has turned his back on his vision. The urban center has grown ignoring the channel that structured the daily life of its residents for centuries. Just a year ago, fifty representatives of associations and institutions of the town met at the Casa da Cultura to imagine how they would like to see Tins in a decade. They were convened by those responsible for the Renatur Outes project, a plan to “renaturalize” the river that is financed with European funds and in which, in addition to the City Council and the Montescola Foundation, the three Galician universities, the Centro de Estudos Eurorrexionais Galicia- Northern Portugal and the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition. In that forum, the aspirations of those present became purposes and they decided to promote the declaration of rights.
The text advocates that the Tins has the right to be clean, to be fed by well-conserved aquifers, to recover its biological and natural dynamic capacities, to “flow freely and without impediments”, to have its banks and riverside forests restored, to transmit between generations the cultural and biocultural heritage it houses and to repair “any damage, past, present or future, that has been caused by human action or omission.” Councilor Alba Quintela believes that if the neighbors reactivate the connection with Tins that their ancestors enjoyed, the measures taken to take care of it will go smoothly: “We have to link the environmental with the emotional, because if the population does not have a connection emotionally, conservation policies do not work.”
The Tins rescue plan is endowed with 900,000 euros and will be carried out until the end of 2025. A team of biologists from the University of Santiago will be in charge of reviving its battered biodiversity. Thanks to the work of volunteers, including that of Outes schoolchildren, invasive species such as acacias or man's love are already being eradicated (Tradescantia fluminensis) and planting native trees and shrubs. Miguel Serrano, from the Botany Area, explains that the project has an experimental aspect. They will create islands of biodiversity, that is, enclaves where species will be planted that help ecologically restore the river, serving as refuge or food for fauna. The idea is to test different designs “to see which communities adapt best to climate changes.” And they will take the opportunity to reintroduce a “small treasure of biodiversity”: the fern Dryopteris guanchicaa botanical “relic” from before the ice ages that is threatened.
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The magic stone that was lost
Another objective is to solve the problem of flooding, exacerbated in recent years by human interventions in the riverbed and the abandonment of trades that were once linked to its waters. Geographers and architects from the universities of Santiago and A Coruña are studying the past and present of Tins to unravel the origin of these overflows, which even affect the school's facilities. Óscar Fuertes and his team from the Department of Architectural Projects, Urban Planning and Composition of the School of Architecture of A Coruña look for solutions by studying the “idiosyncrasy” and “memory” of the Tins, a “very alive” river in which they once operated. eight mills – now abandoned – equipped with channels that had gates to regulate the flow. A woman, Fuertes says, told them about a stone that “when it got soaked from above” alerted the neighborhood that the floodgates had to be opened. Unfortunately, that alert system from Mother Nature was lost when a park was built in the area.
The promoters of the recovery of Tins are considering the creation of a citizen council to ensure compliance with their rights. The lack of such a body is not the only limitation of the project. This 15-kilometer channel originates in the neighboring municipality of Mazaricos, which does not participate in the initiative. The declaration of rights approved by the Outes City Council only covers the slope of the Tins that runs through its municipal area and the actions of the renaturalization project only affect the urban section, approximately one kilometer. In any case, its promoters trust that they have marked “a starting point.” There are already movements to put together a more ambitious project that would affect the entire Ulla basin, which flows into the Arousa estuary after traveling almost 140 kilometers.
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