Ecologistas en Acción has published its annual report on the state of the Costa Tropical beaches, giving  a fail mark for two of them.

One of the beaches is the Pozuelo (Albuñol) and the other is the Playa del Peñón in Salobreña, which fail for different reasons.

They say that the Pozuelo, which can be found at Rábita, en Albuñol, is internationally known as the Playa de la Mugrees (Dirty Beach) owing to the tonnes of discarded, greenhouse plastic that turns up on the beach, as well as toxic elements in the top layer of sand.

All of the illegal greenhouses that were on new land, formed by soil erosion further up the ramblas, were demolished but the heavily contaminated topsoil (optimistically called “sand”) remains. The result is that there is no bio-diversity there.

Now we come to Playa del Peñón in Salobreña. This time the problem is a brick intrusion one. Until the plans to build hotels along there, it was one of the last undeveloped beaches left along the coastline of Granada.

Now, the ecologists complain, street lighting along unused pavements, laid as infrastructure for the coming hotels, floods this once natural landscape with light contamination. All the old irrigation ditches and walls have been bulldozed.

In short, they believe that it should have been left as arable land and that the whole TH1 (land set aside for hotel development) has been a costly blunder because, they consider, the days of macro-hotels and crowded beaches (a-la-70s-Torremolinos) are over.

(News: Salobrena/Albuñol, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)