San Carlos River Basin, northeastern Costa Rica

Water Use

The hydropower sector is the largest water user in the basin followed by agriculture, domestic water uses and tourism (Water direction, 2020). Today pineapple is the highest volume export crop in San Carlos with more than 10,448 hectares of plantations (Figure 5). This crop has a constant demand for water and soil, is in continued expansion, and exerts increasing pressures on the natural resources, particularly water, and poses a serious threat to water quality and quantity through fertilizer and pesticides and locally excessive extraction of groundwater (Rodriguez, nd). Figure 8 and 9 indicate that most hydropower projects directly use water that is generated from protected forested areas in the headwaters and that the more intense agriculture is located downstream of the hydropower generators. The latter downstream gradient of water users bears a certain potential for water resources conflicts.

Tourism increased since the late 1980s mainly in the district of La Fortuna with an ecotourism approach. Hydropower generation has also proliferated (Figure 9) with the first large scale Hydropower project that created the artificial Lake Arenal in the 1950s that exports water from the San Carlos basin now into the Pacific Bebedero river basin. Due to this water diversion, we excluded the Lake Arenal sub-catchment from the natural drainage system of the San Carlos River basin delineation.

Figure 9. Hydropower projects in the San Carlos river basin.

 References

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