Home » News » Spills and lack of sanitation, the main problems of the 48 most polluted beaches in Spain | Society

Spills and lack of sanitation, the main problems of the 48 most polluted beaches in Spain | Society


View of the San Gabriel beach to the south of the city of Alicante, one of the ‘awarded’ by Ecologista en Acción.MORELL / EFE

The black badges awarded by Ecologistas en Acción point to the most polluted beaches. Deliver two banners, one for pollution and the other for environmental mismanagement, to each coastal province, plus Ceuta and Melilla. None is spared. The organization reviews the 8,000 kilometers of coastline and selects the 48 worst sandy areas each year. “It does not mean that only these points exist, we made a selection of the worst situations,” explains Clara Megías, coordinator of the report. In 2020, the report delves into the loss of biodiversity that causes poor management and human pressure in the sand and in the sea. This year is the one that the organization has received the most complaints for spills and poor purification, 40% of the cases, which leads them to ask whether “from the first sanction in 2018 [debido a los vertidos sin depurar] measures are being taken by the EU ”to solve the problem. When the report was closed, more than 32 million euros of fine had been paid.

19 black flags have been delivered for untreated water discharges, eight for urban speculation, six for industrial conditions, six for shocking ports and cruise ships, five for coastal erosion and works, two for affections to biodiversity, one for accumulation of rubbish and another for more than one specific cause.

The problems are eternal in many of the areas, which repeat the flag. Among them are Gijón, due to its deficient sanitation system; Santa Cruz de Tenerife with the project of the port of Fonsalía or Murcia due to the serious situation in which the Mar Menor is found, harassed by discharges from agriculture and urban pressure. Other problems that continue to drag on is the “illegal hotel El Algarrobico (Almería) or the unnecessary expansion of the port of Bilbao”. There are also new problems such as that of the La Tejita hotel in Granadilla de Abona (Tenerife), a construction nestled on a virgin beach, which affects the dune system, whose construction was stopped in a precautionary way by the Ministry for Ecological Transition last week.

This mismanagement of the coastline is fattened by the seabed that loses biodiversity, adds Ecologists in Action. The main affected are the nacra (pinna), a large mollusk decimated by disease; the limpetPatella ferruginea), the meadows of the seagrass Cymodocea nodosa, or algae of the genus Gelidium spp. In all cases, the stocks are in very poor condition. Regarding birds, the study focuses on the problems faced by the shag population in Asturias due to overfishing and the abandonment of the Audouin gull (Ceuta), which is prevented from settling in the port area.

In the 15 years that Ecologistas en Acción has been preparing the report, some problems have been solved such as the stoppage last winter of the San Vicente (Cantabria) marina project, that of El Molinar in the Balearic Islands or that of the port of Melilla. Also noteworthy is the closure of the Ercros factory (Tarragona) this month that was spilling into the Flix reservoir or the ruling of the Constitutional Court that ended the threat of building a macro-urbanization in the plain of the Marina de Cope (Murcia).

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