How do people who live in the mountains in, say, Peru, where there’s no running water, manage to harvest fresh drinking and gardening water? The answer is, apparently, in the air.

Well, not the air itself, but in fog.

Catching water

Villagers who live in Villa Lourdes in Peru are using Atrapanieblas to “catch” fog. Atrapanieblas are large nets that the villagers have placed along the village’s mountain hillside. The nets capture the condensation that comes from the daily fog. The farmers who live in the village harvest almost 200 to 400 liters a day. After the water harvest, the farmers place the water in tanks. The water then goes through a gravity-fed system to water the farmers’ crops below.

Harvesting this water is a great help to the villagers. It saves them money—if they didn’t harvest this water, they’d have to pay truck drivers to bring water to the village daily. It’s also an incredibly green, water-saving option.

And in Morocco…

Peru isn’t the only country that’s using this sustainable method.

Five Moroccan villages are using mesh netting and steel polls to harvest fog, too. The fog harvesting “system” resides in the Anti-Atlas mountain range. Homes, two schools, and a mosque are benefiting from the fog-harvesting system. Morocco’s system gives the fog time to condense and once the fog turns into water droplets, it collects in underground basins and is “purified and pumped into people’s homes,” the Middle East Eye reports.

“In Morocco, each fog-harvesting unit measures 30 square metres—two, juxtaposed 15-square-metre pieces of polypropylene netting—and costs $1,000 to make. About 400 people are now using water generated by fog collectors.”

“The mountain serves as a barrier, so the fog goes up and up and up until it reaches the top of the mountain and that’s where we have the nets. So then we just catch the fog and harvest the water from the fog,” Marouane Smaili, office manager at Dar Si Hmad, a Moroccan sustainability and culture group, adds.

Where and how to harvest

While it may seem like you can harvest water from fog anywhere, there are certain places where this process works best.

Apparently, the denser the fog, the larger the water droplets—and if there are strong winds in a region, the winds help force the fog into fog harvesting nets.

But although this system works well, it still has some kinks.

“The fog water is pure, it does not have any minerals. You can drink it, but with time, it may cause some illnesses like goiter. So to add minerals, we mix it with water from the wells,” Smaili explains.

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Image of foggy mountain in Peru via Shutterstock

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