water
Drinking the water in Mexico is always iffy. We recommend not to drink any tap water, although people have told me they’ve been drinking tap water for years with no side effects. I personally have not ever drank water here, unless it came from a bottle, and i have never gotten sick.
the water and ice (ice? haha) served in restaurants and hotels is always purified. No need to order bottled water while dining. Ice by the way is not a common sight. You must ask or its not served. You’ll get a very little bit.
as far as water for your home, there are several scenarios. Alot of us need to have our drinking and house water trucked in. Some of us are lucky and get water from a local aquifer or a well, extracted from aquifers through natural springs or wells, which are recharged largely by rainfall. Some have a communal well and share. Everybody has a different situation depending on where they live. I must have water delivered to my house by truck every 1-2 months. We have a storage unit called a PILA, or pee-la, see picture below, that holds the water, 3000 gallons at a time. it is NOT drinkable and we only use it for showering dishes or the garden. It is up the hill from the house. It is fed by gravity down to the house thru PVC pipe, where we have a good sized pump to pump it into the house. Sometimes the lines get clogged with dirt, run over or dug up by graders. This is a problem.
If I could pick one thing that constantly causes us grief here, its the water situation. For some reason plumbers are hard to find, good ones. I dont beleive they know alot about plumbing and I think i know why. Plumbing parts, especially copper, are terrribly expensive in Mexico. Therefore, many really dont bother with it. Alot of people live with sub adequate plumbing. Therefore, its not a skill or career alot of people pursue. End result is you get an awful lot of residences with plumbing systems, if you can even call it that, that are falling apart.
For drinking water we have to continually fill 5 gallon jugs and place on a pedestal dispenser stand upside down. One 5 gallon container, called a garaphone, lasts us a week or so. there are several options here too. You can have SPARKLETTS man come to your house and re-fill the jugs and deliver the jugs right to you. We choose to take our jugs to the store and fill them ourselves, this is far cheaper, but less convenient. The jugs are heavy when full and cumbersome. You can take them to a purification stand where they rinse out the jugs, fill them for you and even take them to your car. This is the best option if $$ is tight.
