Mr Grumpy

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By Mr Grumpy - Thu 15th Aug 2013

 

The Tie-Dyed, Beard festooned activists at Greenpeace have done it again.

Not content with attempting to board Japanese Whaling ships, lashing their rubber dinghies to the bottom of oil rigs or whatever, Tarquin and Cressida at Greenpeace Spain have now decided to turn their attention to the subject of the Spanish Coastline.

In their recent report “Destruction at all Costa” (see what they did there... ?), the nit your own sandals crew have decided to educate the public as to the damage done by Spanish developers between the ‘boom years’ of 1987 – 2005.

As such, ever eager to jump on any opportunity to ‘warn’ the public, the lentil-munchers have rolled out a ‘Top Ten’ list of the worst areas of the Spanish Coastline to have suffered ‘Destruction’.

I suppose I am critical of the report for 4 reasons : 1.) Why “Warn” us about something that happened in the past, and we can no longer do anything about ? 2.) Surely the measures imposed since the 1987-2005 years make some attempt at least to address such “destruction” ? 3.) Having been to quite a few of the top 10 offending areas, personally I can think of worse atrocities to have befallen the Spanish Environment, 4.) Some of the offending Towns have been unfairly caught in a ‘no-win’ situation : Organic growth, being trapped between the Coastal Motorway and the Sea and pressure to take advantage of the Tourist Industry have left them with little choice to develop or be damned.

I’m all for protecting the environment, but honestly, I would have thought that they could have found something more worthy to do with their time – maybe like alerting us to something we actually could do something about, and could act upon to make a difference.

Publishing a list of where a collection of sandal-wearing hippies ‘consider’ the worst offending areas of the Spanish Coastline to be, does not seem to achieve that much other than represent a cheap and feeble attempt to grab a few column inches.

Apparently, the Top Ten worst offending areas of the Spanish Coastline are as follows (in no particular order) :

* Calpe, Alicante

* Calvia, Majorca

* Chiclana de la Frontera, Cadiz

* Cubelles, Barcelona

* Oliva, Valencia

* Sant Josep de sa Talaia, Ibiza

* San Bartlome de Tirajana, Gran Canaria

* Vera, Almeria

* Zierbena, Biscay

So there we go : Comforting to know that Greenpeace believe that so many of us Expats live with striking distance of some eyesore.

At least I’m not confined to driving an aged Citroen 2CV around for the rest of my life.

(I think I managed to restrain myself on the Stereotype front this time around.... ?)