In Alcalá de Henares, all the neighbors ask each other the same question: “Do you have water?”. Some joke that they haven’t been able to bathe, others celebrate that at least a little water is now coming out of the taps ―although with low pressure and a bit yellowish―. Calm and water are slowly returning. The city council reported this Wednesday that the breakdown that caused the outage lasting more than 24 hours has been repaired, but clarified that “the system needs time to recover its normal operation.” Meanwhile, the neighbors whose homes still have no water have started searching for jugs, which have been sold out in most supermarkets since Tuesday night.
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Viviana Zapata has been lucky. She lives in the Reyes Católicos neighborhood, where at eleven in the morning the water had not yet returned. A neighbor told her that there were jugs at the Carrefour downtown. Without thinking twice, she took the stroller with her baby on board and went to get water. “You’re never prepared. You get used to these things not happening,” she says while waiting for the bus after buying a couple of jugs. The procession continues. More and more neighbors go out with jugs in hand before they run out again. José María has nine, but his case is mere coincidence. He says he usually buys that amount because he likes to have water at home. He lives downtown, on the second floor, and water still does not come out of his tap with normal pressure. “Since I had reserves, I helped a couple of neighbors,” he adds.
The hours without water pushed the more than 200,000 inhabitants of Alcalá de Henares to change their routine. Yolanda lives in Ensanche, a neighborhood in district IV, and had to shower at her workplace in Madrid because she didn’t have the chance to collect water the day before. “I’ve heard of neighbors who went to Madrid to collect water or bathe,” she says. Although there was a deployment with tanker trucks to supply all districts, the supply ran out quickly and was not enough, according to some neighbors, who criticize a “lack of information” from the city council.
What time does the water arrive?
The city council has reported that, although the main network breakdown has been repaired, the system needs time to recover its normal operation. “The network is filling progressively: first pipes, then reservoirs, and finally homes,” it explained in a press release. An additional incident in Marchamalo (Guadalajara) on Tuesday afternoon also caused a delay in recovery. Without venturing an exact time, the city council said it expects the supply to be “practically normalized in the coming hours.”
The most distant or elevated areas of the municipality will be the last to recover pressure, so, the city council anticipates, in some specific areas full normalization may be delayed until Thursday. “We have to take into account that the largest municipalities downstream, such as Azuqueca and Alcalá de Henares, need all the previous network pipes to be filled, and until all the reservoirs of the previous municipalities are filled, the flow will not reach our cities,” reads the press release.
The manager of Aguas de Alcalá explains the supply situation:
— Ayuntamiento de Alcalá de Henares (@AytoAlcalaH) April 15, 2026
💧 The main breakdown has already been repaired
💧 An incident in Marchamalo yesterday afternoon delayed the normalization of flow and slowed recovery
💧 The system is filling progressively to avoid… pic.twitter.com/id9TtszLyg
The breakdown that caused the outage took place in Yunquera de Henares (Guadalajara) and involved the valve of the general network of the Mancomunidad de Aguas del Sorbe (MAS), which mainly supplies 43 municipalities in the province of Guadalajara and the Madrid municipality of Alcalá de Henares.
The hours without water in this locality have had political repercussions. From Más Madrid, they have demanded the resignation of the mayor, Judit Piquet, who is also president of the Mancomunidad de Aguas del Sorbe. “The mayor has a compatibility problem and it is evident that she does not fulfill all her responsibilities,” they have claimed from the party, while criticizing Piquet for “showing her profile as mayor and hiding that she is the president of MAS, as if this crisis had caught her by surprise.” “The only political figure who has faced the public from MAS is the vice president, her party colleague Juan Carlos Martín, from the PP of Alovera, despite having taken office only two weeks ago, while Piquet has presided over MAS since 2023,” continues the press release from Más Madrid.
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