The European project GestEAUr (Sustainable and Digitalized Water Management in Rural Areas of the SUDOE region), funded by the Interreg Sudoe programme, provides public administrations, management entities, and sector professionals with a catalogue of techniques and solutions for managing the entire water cycle in rural areas. This resource is designed as a practical reference tool to improve efficiency, water quality, and governance of water resources across the SUDOE territory.
The SUDOE region includes 26 regions and autonomous cities in Spain, Portugal, and France, as well as the Principality of Andorra. It represents nearly 18.3% of the European Union’s territory and is home to more than 68 million inhabitants. In many of its rural areas, water management faces specific challenges related to resource availability, dispersed populations, and the technical capacity of municipalities.
To support decision-making, the catalogue organizes different technical solutions across the three phases of the integrated water cycle: drinking water treatment, wastewater treatment, and water reuse. Each technique is presented through concise fact sheets describing how it works, its application conditions, and its main technical characteristics.
In the drinking water treatment phase, processes such as pre-treatment, coagulation, sedimentation, filtration, and disinfection are included. In wastewater treatment, solutions are structured into different stages (pre-treatment, primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment), while water regeneration techniques are classified according to their final uses, such as urban, agricultural, or industrial use.
Selecting the most appropriate technology depends on multiple factors, including the intended use of the treated water, implementation and maintenance costs, availability of technical staff, climatic conditions, and land characteristics. For this reason, the catalogue synthesizes this information into comparable fact sheets that facilitate the evaluation of different alternatives.
This resource will soon be complemented by the digital tool SID_AQUARURAL, designed to support digital management and predictive control of water treatment processes in real time by municipalities and rural associations.
With this initiative, GestEAUr contributes to promoting sustainable and cost-effective solutions to improve water management in rural areas of the SUDOE region.
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