Calamity born of concrete

A frayed copy of Don Quixote was tucked under the front seat of Roberto Oliveros' battered white truck as he sallied forth through the fast-changing plains of central Spain.

Where the addled Cervantes hero tilted at windmills, Oliveros and his environmentalist friends see another towering enemy dotting this La Mancha landscape: construction cranes.

An unbridled building boom, which first turned much of Spain's once captivating coastline into a mile-wide belt of shopping malls, vacation homes and sunburnt foreigners, more recently has spread deep into the country's heartland, endangered some of the most precious and diverse flora and fauna in Europe and sucked an already arid region dry of water.

Nearly 30 per cent of Spain is in the process of becoming desert, according to a report by Adena, Spain's branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

“We have tried to raise the alarm, before everything goes to hell,'' said Oliveros, from the Toledo office of Ecologists in Action, Spain's largest consortium of environmentalist groups.

Fuelled by corruption, speculation and a hot market that only recently cooled, vast patches of regions such as Castilla-La Mancha are being swallowed up by housing developments, often on land designated as national parks or as protected zones because of delicate ecosystems.

Abrupt downturn

Once a quiet countryside of gentle hills, olive groves, medieval castles and cattle ranches, the land is now pocked with patches of condominiums, golf courses and prefabricated swimming pools.

And the most bitter twist for environmentalists is that an abrupt downturn in the Spanish economy, not unlike the present American financial crisis, means that most of the tens of thousands of new houses will go unsold.

Spain caught a roaring case of property fever a few years ago; owning a home became part of achieving the European dream in a nation catching up with the rest of the West.

Compounded by an influx of British and other foreign second-home buyers, demand soared, prices soared even higher and greed infected the boom.

Backroom re-zoning has stolen property from under the feet of small landowners and farmers. Building permits have been granted where there is no possibility of water or sewerage infrastructure.

The abuse became so widespread that an investigative commission of the European Union last year branded Spain's urban-development practices illegal under European law and a violation of cultural rights.

Despite a slew of criminal cases, government officials have proved themselves unable or unwilling to control the growth and have often profited from it in cahoots with unscrupulous developers.

“From the political Right, or the Left, it doesn't seem to matter,'' Juan Aceituno, another member of Ecologists in Action, said.

Developers say they were merely meeting a demand for housing and turning a legitimate profit; because government in Spain is so decentralised, with each of 17 autonomous regions in charge of urban policies, officials have claimed impotence in setting or enforcing rules.

For the past couple of years, it has been up to a band of environmentalist guerrillas backed by so-called green attorneys to challenge what they call “savage urbanisation''. Battles are won and many more lost.

In one victory in Toledo, Oliveros and his associates managed to stop an apartment complex from being built on the ruins of one of the most important Visigoth sites in central Spain, planting themselves in front of bulldozers poised to dig up the site.

For every triumph, however, there have been defeats. Driving up the road from Toledo, the entrances of towns are gauntlets of cranes, brick factories and warehouses selling tile, plumbing materials and bathroom fixtures.

Thirty-five miles north of Toledo, a mini-city and golf course are encroaching on the picturesque medieval town of Escalona.

Environmentalists say its builders destroyed 100-year-old oak trees (which were used by the developers in promotional literature as a reason to move there) and that the settlement, like similar projects, is dipping ever deeper into aquifers to supply residents with water.

Across Spain, nearly 20,000 illegal wells are sucking aquifers to support new housing tracts.

And in the drought-ridden south, scores of water-guzzling golf courses are incongruously covering the land.

The drought of 2005 was the country's worst in more than 50 years and rainfall is continuing to become scarcer in the Iberian peninsula, said Francisco Pugnaire, a member of the state's Arid Zone Experimental Station. This year, water had to be shipped to Barcelona.

The Iberian peninsula has the richest biodiversity of the continent, including an estimated 150 species of flora and fauna of varying degrees of rarity.

Castilla-La Mancha, for example, is home to one of Europe's rare lynx habitats.

In the north, a ski resort is being built alongside a refuge for the endangered brown bear. To the south houses pop up steadily inside a bird sanctuary.

In the Avila region, environmentalists along with a group of dissident city officials, have been fighting to stop the construction of 1,600 houses, a hotel and four golf courses in a protected pine forest and bird sanctuary.

Before a court intervened, 3,000 trees were chopped down, destroying part of the habitat of imperial eagles and black storks, an endangered species.

Environmentalists say they are encouraged by a new crop of court rulings in their favour and by the fact that Spain's economic crisis is finally putting the brakes on further construction.
But, they say, it is late, and the damage is done.