Lleida is at the centre of a cannabis model that Albanian organised crime groups have copied across the Catalan Pyrenees and the Franja. The network grew after the 2014 police crackdown in Lazarat, Albania, and has since adapted to the rugged terrain of western Catalonia.
The groups have used pine forests, irrigation ponds dug into mountainsides, rivers and reservoirs to support outdoor crops. They have also buried generators to reduce noise and used workers who live on site for long periods. Reports describe this as a large-scale production system that has turned sparsely populated mountain areas into a major cannabis hub.
The first major sign in Lleida came in July 2019 in Os de Balaguer, when the Guardia Civil's environmental protection unit, Seprona, found 2,427 cannabis plants on the right bank of the Santa Anna reservoir. Police said the site matched the imported method, with water pumped from the reservoir using an electric generator. A 32-year-old Albanian man was arrested. More on the area can be found on our news tag page.
Four months later, in November 2019, the National Police found 16,000 plants, equivalent to 3,500 kilograms of biomass, in clearings in pine forests in Agüero and Murillo de Gállego, in the Huesca Pre-Pyrenees. Officers said the plots were not small hidden grows, but a fragmented version of the Lazarat model. In July 2020, Operation Templón-Osbale linked an outdoor site in the Noguera Ribagorçana corridor with a building in Monzón and a logistics villa in Lleida, and four Albanian nationals were arrested.
In September 2020, the Mossos d'Esquadra disrupted another harvest of more than 1,800 kilograms of marijuana near the Camarasa reservoir in La Noguera, leading to five Albanian arrests. The chronology of these cases shows when macro-plantations were detected, not necessarily when they began, with an earlier phase of setup likely taking place after the fall of Lazarat.
Police have since identified hotspots in La Noguera, Alt Urgell and Pallars, including Coll de Nargó, Fígols i Alinyà, Soriguera and Tremp. In Huesca, the corridor runs from the Pre-Pyrenean pine forests of Gállego to Sobrarbe and Ribagorça. While mountain plantations remain, investigators say the business has increasingly shifted indoors, into warehouses, flats, basements, farms, chalets, country houses and mixed sites.
Sergeant David Mora of the Mossos d'Esquadra said the cannabis economy now sits alongside an economy of stolen electricity. He said that means fewer camps in pine forests and more industrial warehouses, less buried hosing and more overloaded transformers, and less aerial surveillance but more unusual electricity use. In April 2026, a Mossos operation in La Mariola pointed to a suspected alliance between Albanian traffickers and local clans, involving marijuana, weapons, ammunition, money, electricity fraud and properties.
