The Citizens Who Turned a Dying Lagoon Into a Legal Person

The Mar Menor, a 135 km2 coastal lagoon in Murcia, collapsed under decades of fertiliser runoff from irrigated agriculture, with mass fish die-offs in 2016, 2019 and 2021 leaving tonnes of dead fish on its shores. Rather than found another NGO, a promoting commission led by legal scholar Teresa Vicente used Spain's Iniciativa Legislativa Popular mechanism to put a citizens' bill directly before parliament, gathering 639,826 verified signatures — 28% more than required. On 30 September 2022 the Spanish parliament passed Law 19/2022, recognising the lagoon and its whole catchment as a legal person with rights to exist, evolve naturally and be restored, the first ecosystem in Europe to hold such status. The law created a three-part guardianship — a committee of representatives, a monitoring commission and a scientific committee — so that any citizen can go to court on the lagoon's behalf, and the Constitutional Court has since upheld it.