It's the hottest week of the year, and much of Spain and Portugal is on some kind of heat alert. These are issued by the national meteorological institutes of each country, and are colour-coded green, yellow, orange and red, from safe to dangerous. The Portuguese districts on orange alert (indicating an "important risk") are Bragança, Guarda, Portalegre and Évora. The Spanish provinces on orange alert are Toledo and Ciudad Real in Castile-La Mancha and Jaén, Córdoba and Sevilla in Andalusia. Read more.

Posted by : John Ross on Monday, August 04, 2008 - 10:38 AM 241 reads

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."

Posted by : John Ross on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 - 12:36 PM 570 reads

The Tablas de Daimiel in the province of Ciudad Real have been dry for over three years and are expected to be removed from the UNESCO list of biosphere reserves next month. This would be the first time that UNESCO withdrew biosphere reserve status from a site, though national authorities have in the past removed places from the list on their own account when ecological value of a site has been reduced. Once Spain's largest wetlands, and among its most ecologically valuable, the Tablas de Daimiel have been drained by tens of thousands of legal and illegal wells sunk over decades to obtain water for irrigation, and its underground aquifer can now only supply it with water when this is pumped up. The Tablas de Daimiel will continue to be one of Spain's 14 national parks and, if plans to cure their environmental health work, they may be restored to biosphere reserve status in 2015.

Posted by : John Ross on Monday, June 02, 2008 - 09:51 AM 522 reads

The drought in short: first, there is one; it will get worse; it won't be a terrible disaster; it will be very uncomfortable in certain ways and for some people, though; and the prospects for the future are alarming but not so much as to cry doomwatch. The situation is particularly severe in Catalonia, especially Barcelona, which has barely enough reserves to get it through the summer and is actually shipping water in by tanker, which I think must be a first in Europe (do let me know if I'm wrong, that's what the comments box is for). The picture, by the way, is of Sant Roma church near Barcelona which is currently a tourist attraction because it is normally under water, at the bottom of a reservoir. Read more of this very dry story.

Posted by : John Ross on Friday, May 16, 2008 - 11:11 AM 863 reads

I don't know why Spain and Portugal for Visitors seems more and more like a B-movie review site, in this case dealing with something like "Attack of the Carnivorous Sponges" (preferably played in deadly seriousness to make it funnier). In fact, Asbestopluma hypogea, the rare sponge found 10 miles off the Seco de los Olivos in Almería by Oceana's intrepid investigators, prefers to live in underwater caves, so you are unlikely to find it in your bath, and is in any case less than an inch long. The Ranger expedition has found an ecological goldmine in the Seco de los Olivos area, though unfortunately it has also noticed "a large quantity of lost fishing gear that had damaged various sponges, gorgonians and corals." Read more and find a link to a video of the Ranger discoveries at the Seco de los Olivos seamount here.

Posted by : John Ross on Sunday, August 19, 2007 - 07:56 AM 971 reads