Saviour or devil incarnate? - the tomato industry

Time for a reality check: all is not exactly hunky dory in the Cabo de Gata. Especially coming from France, with its small-scale producers and agriculture that brings people together in a celebration of the good things in life, the shimmering sea of plastic was jaw-dropping. The industrial monoculture was all the more bizarre because of its invisibility - it took us a while to even glimpse that the crop was tomatoes (the shot below a rare occurrence of an open panel).

Juan read in a local newspaper the "good news" that one dynamic producer is expanding, and creating 300 new jobs in plena campana. Yippee. Even more out-of-season fruit can be transported across the planet to support our voracious demand. And yet... without this source of employment families would be forced to seek work elsewhere, as has happened at other times in history.

The environmental protection afforded to areas like the Salinas, described in my last post, is fragile: we saw the encroachment by new developments on its fringes; San José is continuing its urbanisation, eating up the surrounding countryside - new build visible even from Monsul beach. Elsewhere the thinking didn't seem joined up: Monsul would be pristine had the sizeable carpark been accompanied by a simple dry toilet. As it is, the bushes by the beach are confetti'd with loo roll.

And let's not even talk about the coastal development either side of the national park where red-faced Brits eat "nuggets chicken" between rounds of golf. Enough.

Back to happy holiday shots in the next post.