Spoiling the Coast of Spain

By MARA MAHIA


The sinking of the oil tanker, the Prestige, off the coast of Spain this week
feels all too familiar to me. I grew up in La Coruña, Spain, a city about
100 miles from where the ship went down. This is the fourth major oil spill
in the last 30 years that has taken place near the coastal city that much of
my family still calls home.
I remember clearly May 12, 1976, when a tanker carrying about 30 million
gallons of oil sank near La Coruña. Less than seven months earlier, Gen.
Francisco Franco, the fascist ruler of Spain for nearly 40 years, had died.
The country was filled with new political and social expectations. I was 8
years old, and like the rest of the country I was learning to speak using
the subjunctive, a tense that expressed our mood of wishful hope. Watching
that tanker sink dampened those dreams.
Riding the school bus that gray May morning, we saw the hell. Hell was not
the place the nuns at our Catholic school had described. That morning, hell
was the ocean. There was a huge ball of fire in the middle of the sea. It
was raining black drops and all the seagulls screamed like pigs being pushed
to the butcher. I remember the black smoke covering the horizon and the high
flames that could be seen from every part of the shore.
At the time, the sinking was not called a major ecological disaster in
Spain. Though Franco was gone, the press was only just becoming free of his
grip. So we all believed it could not be as bad as the local fishermen said
it was. But the truth was that it was an ecological disaster — and now it
has happened again.
La Coruña is one of the most beautiful and charming cities in Spain. Its
people, called the Coruñeses, have Celtic roots; they play the bagpipe and
drink a lot of beer but don't dance flamenco, cook paella, run the bulls or
say "Olé" in a bullfighting arena. La Coruña is in the north, which is
nothing like other parts of the country — Castilla, cosmopolitan Barcelona
or the ever sunny Andalucía. It is the opposite, and not only for its
idiosyncrasies and the terrible London-like weather (people often joke that
the Coruñeses are shadowless because the sun never comes out) but also for
economic reasons.
Galicia, the region in the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula that
includes La Coruña, was one of the poorest areas of Spain for at least a
century. Even the fact that Franco was from the region didn't help it to get
any financial assistance. Many people fled to other places to build better
lives. So many went to Argentina, in fact, that anyone who arrived there
from Spain — no matter what part of the country they'd come from — is called
a gallego, the term used for people of my region. But La Coruña is no longer
a poor city that people leave. Today the place is flourishing.
Even now, the most important part of La Coruña's culture and economy is
fishing. The gallego fishermen are the most earnest and hard working people
that I've known. But in spite of Galicia's economic boom, the fishermen
still work one of the riskiest and most poorly paid jobs in Europe. I have
seen them fishing in boats of such poor condition that only the urgency of
bringing food to the family could explain their use.
The sinking of the Prestige has damaged the sea and our coast, and brought
terrible harm to people who make their living from the sea. Thousands are
dependent on the season's catch, particularly at Christmas time. The typical
Galician Christmas dinner is made almost exclusively of seafood. They say
it's the best seafood anywhere.
In this same sea now rests the Prestige, a coffin filled with enough oil to
cast a long shadow over a city that has already seen enough darkness.

Mara Mahia has writes a column for Hoy, a Spanish-language newspaper.