The Ebro Hydrographic Confederation (CHE) has definitively withdrawn from its plans the project that for years was in the drawer: The project to build a dam in the gorge of the Salazar River running alongside the village of Aizpurgi in the Admiral of Navascués has disappeared from the Ebro Basin Hydrological Plan between 2022 and 2027.

On 9 July last, the Council's planning officer announced his decision on a teleconferencing conference to present the hydrological plan, but the news has not been disseminated so far. Luisfer Aguado, representative of the ZAIN association created to protect the Salazar River, stressed the importance of the decision in a letter sent to Mendixut magazine: “The great threat that existed on our river since 1987, the possibility of bringing the flow to the reservoir of Yesa, has disappeared from the hydrological plan that is being developed.”

According to this project, in addition to the Aizpurgi Dam, the water would be channeled through a 9 kilometre underground canal that would pass through the Leire Mountains to Yesa – in total 170 Hm3 of water, almost two thirds of the average annual flow of the Salazar River. The Commissioner himself admitted in the presentation that, in future, any such project should be the subject of a "rigorous" study of environmental damage, "and it should be seen whether it would be exceeded".

The ZAIN Association was created in June 2019 and immediately began to raise awareness of the need to protect the Salazar River. So in the summer of that year, about 400 neighbors came together in an auzolan to take the trash off the banks of the river. “We do not know to what extent this work has influenced the decision,” says Aguado in the letter, but we want to express our satisfaction.” In any case, the association recalls that they will continue to protect the Salazar River so that it can be “free and natural”.