Almería is the driest region in all of Europe, but there’s nothing new there – that has been the case for thousands of years.
The real cause for concern is how whole new areas are now succumbing to desertification. “The desert is an ecosystem that’s thousands of years old, with a lot of diversity and interaction between species. But in a desertified area, everything is in vain; even the vegetation dies off,” says Juan Puigdefábregas, one of the world’s leading experts on desertification.
Vicente Andreu, director of the Desertification Research Center (CIDE) in Valencia, believes that people are not really aware of what such land degradation means. “They think about dunes and camels, but it goes deeper than that,” he says. “It means loss of biological production due to human action, which prevents the sustainability of the ecosystem.”
The area in most serious danger is by far the 30,000 hectares of land in and around El Ejido, in Almería – a sea of plastic greenhouses devoted entirely to growing fruit and vegetable crops for export to Europe.
The intensive agricultural activity here is depleting the aquifers and raising salt levels in the soil, bringing El Ejido ever closer to becoming the Spanish version of the Niger Delta in west Africa.