Prestigious villas and watering: demonstration against a golf course near Aix-en-Provence

Several dozen people demonstrated on Saturday morning August 26 against a real estate project in an area housing a golf course in the Bouches-du-Rhône and demanded the restriction of the watering of golf courses during episodes of drought, the organizers said.

About a hundred people gathered without incident near the "château l'Arc golf club" in Fuveau, near Aix-en-Provence, at the call of the National Association for Biodiversity (ANB), the National tree monitoring group and the local collective Eau Secours.

They denounced in particular a project to build some 130 villas on the land of the estate, an "exceptional" program whose bare land is currently offered for sale on the golf course "between 520.000 and 900.000 euros".

The program has obtained the necessary planning permissions, but several associations filed a complaint in mid-July against the project promoters for "degradation, alteration and destruction of the habitat of protected species and intentional disturbance of protected species", in particular birds, reptiles and amphibians.

"We demand the suspension of the works, the machines must not return, we are ready to defend every square meter", declared to AFP Pierrot Pantel, of the ANB, promoter of the legal action.

The demonstrators also demanded "the total ban on watering golf courses in the region from drought alert level 3", i.e. the heightened alert level, the 3rd on a scale of 4, which provides for restrictions of use. , for her part, indicated Jeanne Valabrègue, of the Eau Secours collective.

"Water is a global resource, the question of the legitimacy of a golf course to be watered arises in the climatic situation that we are going through," she said.

The golf management was not immediately reachable.