Salvador Illa has established as one of his priorities the improvement of water management in Catalonia and has chosen to entrust this task to Concha Zorrilla, engineer and director of the Veolia group, Agbar’s parent company. Zorrilla will assume a newly created general directorate, that of Water Transition, with the aim of modernizing the population’s supply infrastructure and economic activity for the future.
The new position, put forward by Nació Digital and confirmed by this newspaper, will be part of the Department of Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition, headed by Councilor Sílvia Paneque. The rank of general director will mean being above the Catalan Water Agency (ACA), which is the public company that manages and plans water policy.
Graduated in Industrial Engineering from the Universidad Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Zorrilla has alternated her employment in the Administration with the private sector, almost always related to waste management. In the last two years, she has been a senior consultant in sustainable development and environment for the French multinational Veòlia.
During a large part of her recent career, between 2004 and 2023, she held the position of technical director of the Vallès Occidental Waste Consortium, with a two-year interruption (2012-2014) to assume the commercial direction of the company of Aigües. Sabadell (CASSA), which was acquired by Agbar at that time.
Since 2022, Zorrilla has been working in the waste area of Veolia, which since 2022 has been the parent company of Agbar, among other subsidiaries managing water infrastructure in Catalonia and throughout Spain. Aigües de Barcelona, with a minority public participation of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB), assumes the management of the infrastructure that brings water to the homes of the Catalan capital and its metropolitan area.
The planning of the water strategy announced by the government for the next 15 years will depend on its general orientation, to ensure that in 2040 Catalonia is less dependent on reservoirs than it is today, in a context of increasingly severe droughts. During this period, the Generalitat must promote infrastructures such as the two desalination plants already planned (in Tordera and Foix) and the new one on the Costa Brava or decide on a possible transfer of the Ebro.
Zorrilla’s appointment has not yet been included among those made public by the government after its Executive Council on Tuesday. Among others, Susi López stands out as Director of Transport and Mobility (of the Terrassa City Council); Sonsoles Letang in the Department of Environmental Quality and Climate Change (until now mayor of the city of Sant Quirze Safaja); Isabel Carrasco in the Department of Childhood and Adolescence (DGAIA) or Marta Angerri as Director of Commerce (in recent years she has held a position in the Ametller Origen group).
