A death foretold. The Tablas de Daimiel National Park has been so depleted of water for so long that a peat fire is now raging beneath it. Except that peat fires don't rage, they smoulder, so persistently that they are practically impossible to extinguish except by complete soaking in water. The water table has fallen so far, though, that there is no feasible way to get the vast amount of water required to the area before next January. UNESCO has recommended that the park be stripped of its biosphere reserve status if its degradation is not corrected before 2011, a goal which looks increasingly remote.

Five firefighters have died and hundreds of hectares of countryside have been devastated. Eastern Spain has been hardest hit, with fires in Lerida, Tarragona, Castellón, Teruel and Almería, but central Spain has also suffered extensively (Burgos, Soria and Guadalajara) and Cáceres in Extremadura in the west of Spain is now being assailed by the flames. It is estimated that the area destroyed, nearly 300 square miles, is already twice that burnt last year. The video below shows the burning of the bucolic landscape around the picture-postcard hilltop town of Mojácar, where thousands of residents had to be evacuated last week.

See the next page for more of this story, including important advice from Britain's Foreign Office and the Spanish Ministry of the Environment.

Sir David Attenborough is the 2009 Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for the social sciences. In its decision, the jury says "His interest in the problems of our times, his permanent pursuit of excellence and the quality of his research have earned him the acknowledgement of the international academic community as well as making him a figure of great social renown thanks to the dissemination of his work in the major media, especially television." Nice one, Dave. Other award winners announced so far this year include another Brit, architect Norman Foster (the Arts), the World Health Organization (International Cooperation), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Communication and Humanities), Martin Cooper and Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (Technical and Scientific Research), and Ismail Kadaré (Letters). The awards for Sports and Concord will be announced in September. See the next page for more about the Premios Principe de Asturias, 2009, plus a fabulous "Attenborough-moment" video.

The UNESCO "Man and the Biosphere" programme admitted twenty-odd new sites as biosphere reserves last month, three of which are in Spain and/or Portugal (that's one in Spain, one in Portugal and one in both). The new sites are Formentera in the Canary Islands, Flores Island in the Azores, and the adjoining Gerês-Jures nature reserves in the north of Portugal and south of Galicia, considered as one. Biosphere reserves differ from natural parks in that they are not wilderness areas but places where Man and nature have interacted to create ecological niches and ecosystems, now threatened as ways of life change (for our purposes, that means they are usually attractive landscapes but that you can generally find a drink and a meal somewhere). I have put together a map of biosphere reserves in Spain and Portugal.

Journalists always get things a bit wrong, don't they? If you've been looking for information or news about Spain recently, you've probably run across the Guardian's graphic report on "The destruction of Spain's coastline," a series of twelve photos. It starts off well, with a couple of pictures of the horrendous, illegal Azata del Sol complex on the Algarrobico beach in the Cabo de Gata park in Almeria (shown in the photo), but then it loses its sense of direction and heads off to Benidorm and Torremolinos. Wrong! Benidorm, Torremolinos, Calpe and similar places may be ugly (and even that, only from a distance - they're fine when you are actually there), but they are cases of good development, not bad. Why? Because they are examples of "vertical tourism," which means they mostly grow upwards, not outwards. Where Spain has gone off the rails in recent years has not been in these pseudo-Manhattans, but in the hundreds of "urbanisations" that regional and local authorities have allowed to spring up, tempted by the employment and easy money they bring (including, often, bribes and other kinds of funny money). Only 2 / 12 for the Guardian, then. Read on for more about the destruction of the Spanish coastline, including the damning EU report "on the impact of extensive urbanisation in Spain on individual rights of European citizens, on the environment and on the application of EU law."