A group of neighbors of Canelones attended the Senate Environment Commission to denounce the construction of a private farm project in the area of the Swan Lagoon which, as they stated, affects the body of water and the environment.
According to the proposal presented by the private sector to the Municipality of Canelones, it is a project with an “environmentally sustainable approach” that will maintain the “ecosystem” and its “biodiversity.” The owner planned a farm project before the authorities as “non-permanent housing.”
It consists of the division of three registers of productive rural land into 72 lots of more than three hectares each and a final one in natural rural land of 35.7 hectares in contact with the lagoon itself.
The project, however, has accumulated objections among local residentswho reported the case to the Ministry of the Environment in 2024.
Last Tuesday, meanwhile, the Commission in Defense of Laguna del Cisne (group that brings together neighbors) was received by the Senate Environment Commission to present on the matter.
“This project goes against the defense of the environment and the protection of water”, was one of the expressions of the neighbors, as recorded in the shorthand version.
Before the legislators, the group denounced that in the area “they built swimming pools and tennis courts” on natural rural land.
Also They classified the project as a “private neighborhood”despite the fact that the Municipality of Canelones has denied that it is an initiative of these characteristics and has stated that it is “a subdivision of rural land in rural registers.”
“We are trying to impose a private neighborhood, although from the departmental authorities It is justified by saying that it is a closed neighborhood. “My grandparents taught me that if it has a tail, four legs and barks, it’s a dog,” the neighbors said.
The organization called to take care of the lagoon, which “provides water to 30,000 OSE users” in the area and is described as “the southernmost freshwater lagoon in the country”. “We want remain a source of drinking water for the department, especially for the Gold Coast,” they added.
From the Canarian mayor’s office they said that “the project is authorized by the National Cadastre” and “what is in process are the general construction criteria and then give way to the individual criteria of each batch”, which will surely be approved “in a matter of weeks”.
The neighbors assure that they have not found interlocutors who would allow “put a stop to the entrepreneurship of these farms”which according to them violate a human right “to drinking water” and “to preserve the environment of this lagoon.”
The Ministry of the Environment had notified the owner of the fields, Pablo Bidegain, “to “Immediately stop construction and works until obtaining Prior Environmental Authorization.”. For its part, the Neighborhood Commission demanded that the authorities “clearly define the scope” of the Ministry of the Environment’s notice.
The mayor’s office and the ministry did agree on sanction Bidegain for building a dock in the “buffer zone”a protected surface around the lagoon in which no type of intervention can be made.
During the Senate meeting last week, the neighbors also said that the Atlántida Prosecutor’s Office He intimated several members to stop committing the crime of defamation and insults against Bidegain. “At no time did we go to attack him personally; we always took responsibility for the fact that we were against the project,” they said.
The Environment Commission requested that this information also be sent to the Canelones Municipalityto its Departmental Board, to the OSE and to the Ministry of the Environment.
