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This paper aims to confront a theoretical legal approach concerning access to water and the status of the resource it generates with an anthropological approach centered on perceptions of water and their effects on daily practices. Given these confrontations, we offer a vision of water that can be compared to the French notion of "patrimony" and which can be derived from a combination of the concepts of heritage, common, and trust. This leads on the one hand to a demonstration of the social value involved in water and access to it and, on the other, to a debate over who is really protected today by law.