Motril’s Smoke-Free Beach

Motril now has the first non-smoking beach in Andalucia; a 500-metre stretch on Playa Granada between the chiringuitos Oleaje and Los Moriscos.

If that description is still a bit hazy for you, we’re talking the stretch of beach behind Villa Astrida, the summer residence of the Belgian monarchs, Fabiola and Baudouin.

This idea was hatched between the Southern Granada Health Area, the Town Hall, the Junta de Andalucia and Hospital Santa Ana.

Things began to move in 2012 as part of the Red Andaluza de Servicios Sanitarios y Espacios libre de Humo, which the Motril hospital joined in 2014. In fact, the hospital won itself a Gold Medal from the Global Network For Tobacco Free Healthcare Services (GNTH) for this work.

Since then, other entities have joined the project, which has lead to the creation of this smoke-free beach: Asociación Española contra el Cáncer (AECC), the Asociación de Pacientes Cardíacos ‘Mucho Corazón’ de Motril, the Centro Comarcal de Drogas de Motril and the Club de Baloncesto Motril.

The Provincial Health Delegate for the Junta, Sr. Almagro, pointed out that cigarette butts are a big contamination problem as some 4.2 billion cigarette butts around the world are simply thrown down and end up in the sea, washed down through the rain drains. And that’s a real ‘billion’ and not the American one (1,000,000,000) that has been inexplicably adopted by the BBC.

Smoking in Andalucía has dropped over the last decade, which has also been the case just about everywhere in Spain, with the slow demise of the ‘smokers generation.’

(News: Motril, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)

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