Mediterranean Spain Nature Nonprofits

The Spanish Mediterranean coast is where mass tourism was invented, and the consequences are written along it in concrete for hundreds of kilometres. Behind the resorts, though, lie sierras of limestone and pine, wetlands of real importance, and a plain that has become, through the miracle and the disaster of drip irrigation, the vegetable garden of Europe.

The Mar Menor is the emblem of the cost. Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon, it received decades of nutrient runoff from the intensive greenhouse agriculture around it until it collapsed, killing fish and seahorses by the tonne and washing them onto the beaches, an event so shocking that the lagoon was subsequently granted legal personhood, the first ecosystem in Europe to hold rights of its own.

The organizations here fight for the Mar Menor’s recovery, defend the coastal wetlands and dunes that survive between the developments, and confront an agricultural model drawing water from aquifers, sometimes illegally, faster than any rain can replace it in a region that is steadily desertifying.