Golf Courses need lots of Water
Given Cyprus’ hot, dry climate, it takes approximately fifty million litres (11,000,000 gallons) of water to keep a single 18-hole golf course lush and green for a year. That’s roughly the same as almost a thousand average households. Multiplied by fourteen, the extra strain put onto the Cypriot freshwater supply would be roughly equivalent to somewhere around 60,000 extra people moving to the Republic. That’s an awful lot of extra water, when you consider the fact that the whole island has a combined population of just 800,000 residents.
Just a single winter’s severe drought brought home the sobering fact that the Republic’s water infrastructure would simply not be able to cope with the extra consumption associated with Cyprus’ new golf courses. And so the government began to build certain provisions about water supplies into the permits it had issued, provisions which made the jobs of course designers and construction companies substantially more difficult.
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No Water, No Fairways...
In essence, no course or resort would be given the final go-ahead without showing that its fairways would be watered without placing a burden on Cyprus’ water supply.
Faced with the challenge of having to create their own water sources, many of the existing course proposals began to stall, while others emerged with an assortment of imaginative solutions to their fairway irrigation problems. The Secret Valley golf course, for instance, was the first to source their water straight from the sea, via the simple means of acquiring a couple of mobile desalination plants from a well-known UK charity. Indeed, it seems more than a little ironic that these days Secret Valley’s woes stem more from a lack of adequate draining at its scenically stunning Ha Potami (Low River) valley location, than they do from a lack of water. |
Different approaches for different golf courses...
Other sites, such as the Larnaca golf course, soon followed suit by announcing the construction of their own desalination plants, while some venues, such as the Elea Golf Resort, will be using a combination of hardier grass, coupled with recycled waste-water irrigation to not only lower overall consumption, but to also use the resort’s own water supply with maximum efficiency.
With almost four years having passed since the government issued the fourteen in-principle permits for Cyprus’ new golf courses, things finally seem like they’re beginning to move ahead. It is, however, beginning to look somewhat doubtful whether the full number of courses will ever be constructed, and one can only wait and see which of the variously ambitious plans for the forthcoming golf resorts will be given the final seal of government approval.
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