Split Resident Horrified by Waste Above the Jadro Spring
Despite last year's cleanup campaign, piles of garbage have once again been found in the Mačkovac tunnel, threatening the water supply for 300,000 people in central Dalmatia.
Despite last year's cleanup campaign, piles of garbage have once again been found in the Mačkovac tunnel, threatening the water supply for 300,000 people in central Dalmatia.
A Split resident walking in the area above the Jadro River spring on Sunday, August 10, 2026, was taken aback by a sight that, unfortunately, keeps repeating. In the Mačkovac tunnel, part of the former narrow-gauge railway line Split, Sinj, he once again came across large amounts of illegally dumped waste.
His reaction was intense and full of anger, especially given the fact that the garbage is located directly above the spring that supplies water to a large part of central Dalmatia.
"So, the Jadro spring is down there. Come on, people, let's be normal. How stupid, how intellectually bankrupt do you have to be... to dump waste above a spring?",
says the unnamed Split resident in a video shared by Dalmacija Danas.
His fury didn't stop at disbelief. In the rest of the video, he sharply criticized a system that fails to prevent such environmental incidents.
"My people, we have a dysfunctional state when this isn't punished with ten years in prison for... This is terrorism, nothing else.",
he said.
His words carry even more weight when you consider that around 300,000 people rely on water from the Jadro spring. This includes residents of Podstrana, Split, Solin, Klis, Kaštela, all the way to Trogir, Seget, and Čiovo. Dumping waste on the karst terrain above this spring poses a direct threat to public health and the safety of the water supply.
This latest incident is even more concerning because it comes less than a year after a major environmental cleanup campaign. In November 2025, the Klis-Kosa area, just below the Solin, Klis expressway and near the Mačkovac tunnel, was the target of an operation to remove an illegal dump site. The campaign was carried out as part of the Studenca project called "Groundwater, Guardians of Life," and the location was chosen by citizens themselves.
Even then, the organizers warned about the extreme sensitivity of the karst terrain. Today's scenes, however, clearly show that one-off cleanup actions don't yield lasting results if illegal dumping continues unabated.
The Dalmacija Danas portal first highlighted this issue on October 31, 2022, when it published photos from the Mačkovac tunnel under the headline "Shame and Horror: Tunnel in Klis Turned into a Garbage Dump." Even then, readers warned that new waste was appearing in the tunnel every day, including furniture, bags of trash, plastic, clothing, and toys, and that the access road was also littered with rubble and garbage.
The case of the Mačkovac tunnel is part of a broader problem of illegal waste disposal in Croatia. In Gospić, at the site of the former PPK Velebit, remediation of the consequences of illegal waste dumping, including hazardous waste, is underway. During 2026, the Ministry and the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund launched several procedures for its removal and disposal.
At the end of July 2026, the Fund published analyses of the buried waste and sent inquiries about disposal options to 11 hazardous waste landfill operators in the European Union, as well as to four addresses related to permanent storage in closed former salt mines. This data illustrates the complexity and scale of the problem the country is facing.
HRT, meanwhile, has documented cases in the Šibenik hinterland where fertile soil is being dug up from agricultural land and sold, with the resulting pits being filled with construction and other waste. This practice destroys agricultural land and creates an additional hazard for groundwater.
