Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Jun 10, 2008 - 12:36 PM environment

Heard the one about the speculators, the ecological organization and the rise in sea level? A firm of Madrid lawyers, J. Abad & F. Pérez, has announced that it intends to bring a suit against Greenpeace for a series of photomontages Greenpeace published last year showing La Manga del Mar Menor, Murcia, as it will be in 2050 with the sea level half a metre higher, i.e., largely under water. Claiming to represent unnamed inmobilarias, real estate companies, and "hundreds of property owners," José Ángel Abad has said (without the slightest indication this might be the joke it would seem at first sight) that they will sue for over 20 million euros, because "Greenpeace manipulated the forecast rise of half a metre in order to create alarm. It has sunk the property market: no-one is buying and everyone has put their houses on sale." The bare-faced cheek of this is staggering. Greenpeace points out incredulously that "they are trying to make Greenpeace pay for the consequences of the urban destruction of La Manga del Mar Menor."

It is difficult to interpret this as anything other than a smart-ass publicity stunt by a sleazeball law firm, but let's pretend for a moment that we take it seriously. The root of the complaint lies in a book published by Greenpeace in November last year called Photoclima, explaining the effects global warming would have by 2050, according to the predictions of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner. The book included photomontages and covered different themes and places in Spain: rivers as exemplified by the Ebro as it flows through Zaragoza; orange groves in Valencia; glaciars in the Pyrenees; the sea at the Islas Atlánticas reserve in Galicia and the Mar Menor; woodland using Los Alcornocales, Cádiz, as the example; and the immigrants who come to Spain because there are no resources for them in Africa. Different official reports were taken as reference, including the Efecto del Cambio Climático prepared by the University of Castile-La Mancha and presented by the Spanish Ministry of the Environment. In other words, Greenpeace did its homework, as usual.

The media being the media, the aspect of Photoclima which drew most attention was the photomontages of La Manga del Mar Menor under water, and the images were reproduced in most newspapers and broadcast on virtually all Spanish TV channels. That was before the Spanish property bubble burst as it did, between the end of 2007 and the first two or three months of 2008.

It is quite believable that property prices in La Manga might since have fallen alarmingly (to property owners, like I could care), though not by anything close to the 50% that Abad and Pérez are claiming. Added to the near-collapse of the Spanish property market is the fact that La Manga and, indeed, the Mar Menor as a whole are horribly over developed. A development moratorium is on the cards, partly for this reason, partly because of expected climate change and partly because many of the new buildings are out-and-out illegal, wildcat constructions.

You can see a pdf of the book Photoclima here. Or you can buy it online from the Greenpeace store, for the reasonable price of €28.