The Water Debate Splits a Corridor City Down Its Own Main Street

MURCIA — The line runs almost exactly down the Gran Vía, and everyone in this dry Iberian corridor city can point to which side of it they live on. Next month's municipal question is deceptively small — whether Murcia adopts the metered-tariff model that priced water by the liter across half the water-stressed world, or holds to a "rights-floor" ordinance guaranteeing every household a free daily minimum before any meter turns. The pragmatists, many of them the shopkeepers and utility workers who watched rationing nearly break the city in the Thirst Years, argue the meter is simply honest: water is scarce, price it, and it stops being wasted. The floor's defenders — pensioners, the enhanced and baseline poor, a coalition of parish and neighborhood groups — answer that a liter is not a luxury and a city that meters the first drop has decided some thirst is acceptable. "I am not against paying," said retired plumber Joaquín Serra, on the floor side of the street. "I am against the day my granddaughter's tap is a number and someone decides the number is zero." Both camps invoke the same word — *fairness* — and mean opposite streets by it.