The morning is gray and the Mar Menor, motionless, barely shines.
For years he has suffered almost agonizing rattles from lack of salt, lack of oxygen and lack of scruples.
Last August, the umpteenth convulsion occurred: more than 15 tons of fish and algae died from one day to the next and remained floating on the surface.
Intensive agriculture and livestock, frenetic urban development and climate change are destroying a wonder of nature.
The Murcian government admits that the situation is critical and that the Mar Menor survives "in discount time".
The culprit of the disaster is what we used to call progress.
It began with the transfer of the Tagus to the Segura, a hydraulic work devised during the Republic, begun under Franco and completed under the current Constitution: the Cartagena countryside, one of the least rainy regions in Spain, abandoned the traditional rainfed crops and turned to irrigation to become "the garden of Europe".
He continued with tourism and construction.
The region made a fortune.
But the largest salt lagoon on the continent could not withstand such success.
“Everything is compatible if we invest in infrastructures”, says Antonio Luengo.
This man, an engineer and agricultural businessman, knows about compatibilities, because in the Murcian government he is the Minister of Water, Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and the Environment: he manages almost all the factors that intervene in the crisis.
Luengo says that agriculture and livestock are transforming and becoming cleaner.
Can be.
But the Rambla del Albujón, to the south of the town of Los Alcázares, does not stop pouring millions of liters of fresh water (more or less clean, depending on the circumstances) into a small salty sea with an area of 170 square kilometers (the lake Leman, in Switzerland, is three times larger) and very shallow.
The Rambla del Albujón is the drainage of the orchard.
Even controlling discharges, the water table is so high that it overflows.
And when it rains, the water carries tons of agricultural fertilizers into the Mar Menor that kill flora and fauna.
The list of diseases of the Mar Menor is almost endless.
Uncontrolled desalination plants, municipalities that dump their waste into the lagoon when it rains too much, clandestine irrigation… In short, overexploitation.
Approaching the Mar Menor from what local fishermen call the Mar Mayor, the Mediterranean, is overwhelming: the manga, the narrow (less than a kilometer) strip of land that separates one sea from another, looks like a wall of skyscrapers connected without interruption with other walls (Benidorm, Santa Pola, Torrevieja) that offer the most oppressive face of the Spanish coast.
But it is even more impressive to approach from the interior and cross kilometers and kilometers of orchards, greenhouses, factories and warehouses.
That green strip practically reaches the lagoon.
“In summer you can almost pick melons without taking your feet out of the water,” says Encarnación Vergara, better known as Nani, president of the Los Nietos Neighborhood Association.
Nani has been bathing in the Mar Menor for half a century.
“Before you used to go out with crusty skin from so much salt;
now there is hardly any need to shower, it is fresh water,” she says.
Los Nietos and the neighboring town, Los Urrutia, used to have the most beautiful beaches in the area.
Now there is mud, silt and sand that is actually ground stone from the Almeria quarries and that, with humidity, forms a paste similar to cement.
"A disgrace," Nani sighs.
Mouth of the boulevard of El Albujón to the Mar Menor.Pedro Martínez
To the list of diseases mentioned above, another should be added: conflicts between administrations.
The guardianship of the Mar Menor corresponds to the regional government, as confirmed in 2021 by the Constitutional Court when it supported the Murcian law of "recovery and protection" of the lagoon against a Vox appeal.
But the management of the hydrographic basin, from which a large part of the ills arise, is the responsibility of the central government.
In Murcia they demand that discharges like the one on the Rambla del Albujón be completely stopped.
In Madrid they say it is not possible.
And the accusations come and go.
The Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, traveled to the area on Friday and announced more budget to save the Mar Menor (from 382 million to 484 million), improvements in drainage infrastructure and maximum vigilance over unscrupulous farmers.
The president of Murcia, Fernando López Miras, in turn announced the creation of a Monitoring Committee such as the one established to monitor the evolution of the pandemic, with the mission of monitoring the health of the lagoon day by day.
Skepticism and anoxia
People, in general, are skeptical.
"Here the PP rules, in Madrid the PSOE rules and of course, they don't understand each other," argues a pensioner on a small terrace in Los Alcázares.
"Well, when the PP ruled in Madrid, things weren't any better," replies another.
"It doesn't matter, as soon as DANA returns, everything goes to hell again," concludes the first.
DANA, an acronym that corresponds to something as technical as Isolated High Level Depression, appears in any conversation.
What is often called “cold drop” in other places, that is, the increasingly frequent torrential rains on the Mediterranean coast, does not accept colloquial expressions here.
Perhaps because it does more damage than anywhere else.
The flood washes fertilizers into the lagoon, microplankton proliferate, the water turns green and thick, sunlight does not reach the algae at the bottom, the photosynthesis process is interrupted, oxygen disappears and everything dies.
Like last summer and several times before.
This is called anoxia, another common word on the Murcian coast and unusual in the rest of Spain.
Is it really possible to recover the Mar Menor?
Both the central and regional governments say yes, in the long term.
The Murcian councilor Antonio Luengo, who was born on the shores of the lagoon and before becoming a versatile councilor was general director of the Mar Menor, makes some clarifications about the future.
“We have to decide what the goal is.
Return to the Mar Menor of 50 years ago?
At that time there was no sand and to get from the spa to the water you had to cross a quagmire.
I believe that the essential thing is to achieve a reasonable balance that restores the ecosystem, allows agricultural exploitation and maintains the tourism sector”.
That future, possible or not, is still far away.
At the moment the Mar Menor remains very sick, exposed to the next DANA and with the practical certainty of suffering new episodes of anoxia.