ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: South America has a generous natural supply of water although it also has a notorious heterogeneous spatial distribution. Groundwater is an important resource that occurs mostly in sedimentary basins occupying 70% of the territory and in areas of igneous and metamorphic rocks that include mechanically fissured water bearing units of low permeability. Some study cases of intensive exploitation in fractured aquifers are presented in this paper, with examples of the semi-arid northeast of Brazil, in the large metropolis of São Paulo (Brazil), in the basin of the Bogotá river (Colombia), and in the city of Cuzco (Peru), among others. The knowledge of the hydrodynamic and hydrochemical aspects of the fractured aquifers in South America is insufficient, so it is necessary to improve the study of their potentiality inasmuch as, in all cases, groundwater extracted from these aquifers constitutes an essential support for the development of economic activities.
