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Date Published: 13/05/2022

ARCHIVED - Hugely popular American magazine warns visitors off the Mar Menor

ARCHIVED ARTICLE

The US publication has described the Murcia area as a “destination to avoid”

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Hugely popular American magazine warns visitors off the Mar Menor

In an uncomfortable scene of déjà vu, Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon is again this summer beginning to turn into ‘green soup’ due to the amount of nitrate-laden water being flushed from farmland into the Mar Menor. Business owners have already complained of a barrage of summer cancellations due to the deterioration of the natural landscape, and so the last thing they need is more bad publicity.

Unfortunately, this is just what they have received: acclaimed travel mag International Living, whose recommendations have been quoted in influential publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today over the years, has published an article entitled ‘Five Places to Live in Spain; Two to Avoid,’ and it’s fair to say Murcia doesn’t come off the best.

Benalmádena, Mijas, Sitges, Almuñécar and Miraflores de la Sierra are the five places that the newspaper recommends to live, while Gibraltar and the Mar Menor are the destinations that they advise visitors against going to.

“Don’t swim there and don’t buy property in the nearby area,” the magazine baldly states, adding that “the Spaniards who bought holiday homes there cannot sell them due to continuous pollution.”

The article starts off positively enough, praising the Mar Menor’s “warm and clear waters” along with “a national park where there are salt flats that include an important wetland and bird sanctuary.”

It all goes downhill from there though, as International Living states that “after 18 years of warnings from environmentalists, the contamination from the many hotels built on the narrow peninsula has caused an ecological collapse of the marine life in the lagoon.”

The article continues: “In 2017, all the beaches lost their Blue Flag designation due to high water pollution” and that “in September 2019, heavy rains caused flooding that dumped more pollution into the lagoon, causing thousands of dead fish to wash up on the beaches.”

It concludes by describing the episode of anoxia which devastated the Mar Menor in August 2021.

Local groups defending the Mar Menor such as ‘El Mar Menor de los niños’ have been devastated by this latest blast of bad publicity, and have slammed the regional government for their “incompetent” approach of the crisis, which “annihilates us all over the world”.

Image: Archive