A small army of 500 farmers and activists fights desertification in the southeast of the peninsula. Organizations from the Netherlands and Spain have been financing, since 2014, an ecological restoration project that includes the planting of 240,000 trees, shrubs and plant covers in crops.
EL PAÍS visited this dry plateau in 2019 and has now returned to see how this initiative has evolved. The war against desertification is very unequal: during the last decade, Almería and Murcia added 6,008 square kilometers of arid soils that were previously semi-arid.