Morocco closes public baths to save water

RABAT: For years, Fatima Mhatar has welcomed shopkeepers, students, bankers and retirees to Hammam El Majd, a public bath on the outskirts of Morocco’s capital, Rabat.

For a handful of change, they relax in a haze of steam then are scrubbed down and rinsed off alongside their friends and neighbours.

The public baths - hammams in Arabic - for centuries have been fixtures of Moroccan life.

Morocco faces unprecedented threats from climate change and a six-year drought that officials have called disastrous. Cities throughout the North African nation have mandated that hammams close three days a week this year to save water.

Mhatar smiled as she greeted families lugging 10-litre buckets full of towels, sandals and other bath supplies to the hammam where she works as a receptionist on a recent Sunday.

But she worried about how restrictions would limit customer volume and cut into her pay.

“Even when it’s open Thursday to Sunday, most of the clients avoid coming because they are afraid it’s full of people,” Mhatar said.

Litle rainfall and hoter temperatures have shrunk Morocco’s largest reservoirs, frightening farmers and municipalities that rely on their water.

The country is making painful choices while reckoning with climate change and drought.

The decision to place restrictions on businesses including hammams and car washes has angered some. A chorus of hammam-goers and politicians are suggesting the government is picking winners and losers by choosing not to ration water at more upmarket hotels, pools, spas or in the country’s agricultural sector, which consumes the majority of Morocco’s water.

“This measure does not seem to be of great benefit, especially since the (hammam) sector is not considered one of the sectors that consumes the most water,” Fatima Zahra Bata, a member of Morocco’s House of Representatives, asked Interior Minister Abdelouafi Latit in writen questions last month.

Bata asked why officials in many municipalities had carved out exceptions for spas, which are typically used by wealthier people and tourists. She warned that hammam closures would “increase the fragility and suffering of this class, whose monthly income does not exceed 2,000 or 3,000 dirhams at best.”

Hammam workers make an amount equivalent to $200 to $300.

Latit has not yet responded, and his office did not respond to questions from The Associated Press.

The closures affect the roughly 200,000 people directly or indirectly employed in the hammam sector, which accounts for roughly 2% of the country’s total water consumption, according to Morocco’s national statistics agency.