See also this article in El País on the end of the urbanisation boom of the Spanish Mediterranean and its effects.

The mountains had withdrawn from the sea, keeping their distance a mile inland, Near Sotogrande the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer. White-walled Andalusian pueblos presided over the greens and fairways, fortified villages guarding their pastures, but in fact these miniature townships were purpose-built villa complexes financed by Swiss and German property speculators, the winter homes not of local shepherds but of Düsseldorf ad-men and Zürich television executives.

And later

The retirement pueblos lay by the motorway, embalmed in a dream of the sun from which they would never awake. As always when I drove along the coast to Marbella I seemed to be moving through a zone that was fully accessible only to a neuroscientist and scarcely at all to a travel writer. The white facades of the villas and the apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallised by the side the road. Here on the Costa del Sol nothing would ever happen again and the people of the pueblos were already the ghosts of themselves.

J.G. Ballard ‘Cocaine Nights’ 1996

See also:

• Destruction at all co(a)st 2008 Report on the situation of the Spanish coast (Greenpeace) “The Builders and Developers Federation estimates that Spain needs more than 300,000 new dwellings every year. However, during the last four years, this number has almost tripled with 800,000 new dwellings valued between the second half of 2006 and May 2007. Now, the slump in the real estate market has plunged the construction sector into a depression that has affected the entire country.” Excellent review
• State of the Spanish coast (iberianature 2004)
• Also in today’s Guardian:  Campaigners warn of threat to one of Spain’s last pristine beaches “Politicians have long promised to bulldoze the Algarrobico hotel, but the 411-room glass and concrete structure still towers over the El Algarrobico beach in Almería, south-east Spain. Now campaigners say the authorities have changed their tune and are opening the way to more building on this stretch of protected Mediterranean coast.
  

I liked this photo report of the fishing industry in Vigo by Ian Berry of Magnum Photos. The above image “ Gulls follow the trawler in the hope of picking up any fish left uncovered. 2008″
All photos here

Spain is currently the world’s second-biggest tourist destination after France, with the population of 45 million being bolstered every year by as many as 60 million foreign visitors, 80% of whom flock to the coasts. Tourism contributes more than 11 per cent of Spain’s GDP and employs more than two million people. These figures are going to fall in the next few years because of the economic crisis, but the sector faces a much greater long-term threat, that of climate change. According to the Fundación Empresa y Clima “the changes are going to be far more drastic than those caused by the current economic crisis”. Impact are likely to include higher temperatures, loss of beaches due to sea level rise, loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, the reduction of water resources and the increase in forest fires. El Mundo

Meanwhile, the EU has delivered a stinging criticism of Spain’s property laws, allowing urban sprawl and corruption, voting overwhelmingly to freeze hundreds of millions of euros in Spain’s EU funding if the Spanish government does not tackle what the parliament condemned as “extensive urbanisation” practices. BBC

And again, the long-term prospects for the traditional Spanish tourist industry may not be rosy. Over-development of the country’s coasts has seen them lose their much of their appeal for tourists. Some statistics:

• In the six years between 2000 and 2006, urban development within the first two kilometers of the coast of Huelva increased by 48.1 percent.
• Urban sprawl in Valencia increased by 53.1 percent. In just six years, concrete was blighting one out of every 10 previously untouched kilometers of Valencia’s coastline.
• In Alicante and in the Andalusian province of Málaga, more than half of the first two kilometers of coast are under concrete. In Barcelona, just 32 percent of the coastline remains undeveloped. Across Spain, coastal urban sprawl has increased by 22 percent in just six years.

La Comunidad Valenciana construyó un 10% de su costa en sólo seis años (EL País)

• Read in El Mundo

Remarkable news. A diver from Palma claims to have seen (and taken photo above) a possible monk seal (foca monje – Monachus monachus) in the marine reserve of Isla del Toro. The monk seal is considered to be extinct is the Balearic Islands (where it was known popularly as the vell marí – old man of the sea) since the late 1950s, and is among the ten most endangered mammals in the world, with colonies divided between Mauritania and the Eastern Mediterranean, the former being far the stronger. If true, I imagine we are talking about an animal in dispersion or just plain lost. The Balearic government periodically considers the possibility of attempting to reintroduce the animal. Whether it would fare well in an area of sea so popular with pleasure craft is another question. See more in El País

Update: this version of the story from Libertad Balear is much better researched.

There is also a half plan to reintroduce the animal along the Costa Brava (La foca monje volverá a Cadaqués – El País)

A small group of monk seals survived in Cabo de Gata, Almeria until the 1960s.

See also

• The Monachus Guardian
• La foca monje
• Monk seal (Wikipedia)
• Caribbean Monk Seal Gone Extinct From Human Causes Jun. 9, 2008) — After a five year review, NOAA’s Fisheries Service has determined that the Caribbean monk seal, which has not been seen for more than 50 years, has gone extinct — the first type of seal to go extinct from human causes.

Some key facts

• The spill is the largest environmental disaster in Spain’s history.
• 64,000 tons of fuel oil were spilled in the incident
• The cost of the clean-up to the Galician coast alone is estimated at €2.5 billion
• The World Wildlife Fund estimated that 300,000 seabirds died. A study published this month (Nov 2007) shows that hydrocarbons are still present in the seabird chicks (El Mundo)
• Seafood industry was halted along much of Galicia’s coast
• WWF warn of the possibility of other “Prestiges” today and notes three oil spills in Spain this year Sierra Nava (Algeciras), Don Pedro (Ibiza) and Samothraki (Gibraltar) WWF

See also “The largest environmental disaster in Spanish history began during a fierce storm off Galicia’s Coast of Death, la Costa da Morte, on 13th November 2002, as the Prestige oil tanker was sailing from Latvia to Gibraltar, to its ultimate destination of Singapore.” (Typically Spanish) + More on the Prestige oil spill (wikipedia)

“The Balearic islands are to freeze all construction along the most delicate parts of coastlines and around the islands’ capitals, which have been blighted by property developments since mass tourism first arrived in Spain in the 60s. The plan, set to be announced tomorrow, will come into force immediately in an effort to save some of the most beautiful coastlines on the islands of Ibiza, Mallorca and Menorca, from further development.” Read on the Guardian

See also “Medio siglo de éxito del turismo de masas y de élite, más el urbanismo salvaje reciente, han dejado su huella de hormigón sobre buena parte del paisaje costero. Pero la mayor parte del perfil insular, de 1.428 kilómetros, no ha sido explotada: está casi intacta, a salvo del desarrollismo que dejó inaccesible, sin uso público, muchas decenas de kilómetros.” Paraíso y caos en la costa balear (El Pais) “

Photo of beached Fin whale (rorcual común – Balaenoptera physalus) in Las Palmas

More Spanish landscape paintings

The beach takes its name from the 172 English sailors who were drowned off the coast here on 10th November 1890, when their ship, the Serpent, sank in a terrible storm. The Serpent had sailed from Plymouth on Saturday 8 November bound for Sierra Leone. Although there are several versions of what happened, the final verdict was that the Serpent had been lost through an error in navigation. Three surviviors reached the nearby village of Camariñas and sounded the alarm. A search party was sent out and most of the bodies were recovered. They were buried on the beach close to the wreck spot and a small cemetery was built around them. It stands today as a rather sad and lonely mounment. Letters of thanks were sent by the British government to the villagers and the mayor was given a shotgun and the parish priest a gold watch. Unusually for the time the survivors wore lifebelts, and there are claims that the incident led to their widespread use in the British merchant navy.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Serpent
http://josecadaveira.tripod.com/militaryruins/id41.html