Molino de Camou

Molino de Camou, also known as San Isidro, is a farming ejido of about 1,277 people in the countryside east of Hermosillo, on Federal Highway 14 as it climbs toward Ures. It was created on 26 August 1936 in President Lázaro Cárdenas's land reform, and it has been run ever since as the Canal Bajo irrigation unit, with rights to water coming down the Río Sonora. Plots are small: most ejidatarios work four or five hectares.

The village's story is a story about water. In 1991 the Rodolfo Félix Valdés dam, known to everyone as El Molinito, opened just upstream, about two kilometers away, and it now also supplies part of Hermosillo's drinking water. Irrigation water dwindled over the years. Downstream of the dam, irrigated land fell from 9,000 to 3,000 hectares between 1994 and 2012, and in Molino de Camou farmers gave up wheat for fodder crops sold to local cattle ranchers. At times a farmer had to wait up to 24 hours for a turn to water a plot.

In 2014, when the mining spill poisoned the Río Sonora, the village wells were shut during the emergency and reopened months later. In June 2026 the state government handed over a 2.3 km water main with four outlets, a project worth more than 7.1 million pesos that serves 64 growers and some 400 hectares, with a second stage planned.

What a visitor sees is rural Sonora half an hour from the state capital: irrigation ditches shaded by mesquite, sluice gates and pumps, barbed-wire fences and cornfields along the river.