“When I arrived to Nerja ten years ago, I became in love with this part of the coast because it’s great vegetal and animal underwater richness. If you dived along the area that goes from Balcón de Europa to the natural setting Maro-Cerro Gordo, you could see hundreds of square meters of seagrass beds.
Now, everything has disappeared and there is only a spot of six or seven square meters in the area of Maro’s beach, and it is because it is surrounded with rocks. Fishing trawler boats are destroying everything. They approach the coast to thirty or forty meters from the shore. It is a dramatic situation, on red alert.”
With these words Bernabé Jorge Toledo describes the situation that he sees every time he plunges into the depths of the costs in Nerja. He is an experienced diver born in the Canary Islands who settled here for over a decade.
PADI Master Instructor in an official diving centre and school, where he provides courses for all levels, Jorge is very worried for the situation. “If we don’t take care of our seabed, and to top we don’t have a sewage treatment plan, how can we think tourists will keep coming?” he wonders.
According to the explanations of this expert in diving, the surface of seagrasses –also known as eelgrass or Poseidonia prairie- has been reduce "drastically and very dramatically” in the last five years and, especially, after the flood that caused severe damage in Nerja in September 2007.
“IT HAS TO RECOVER BY ITSELF” SAYS THE GOVERNMENT
“Rivers swept away everything to the sea and buried several meters of seagrasses in the area of the natural setting in Maro. In El Molino de Papel it was incredible. We have found every kind of things: washing machines, lampposts… It is impressive. And the worst thing is that the Regional Government of Andalusia has told us not to try any cleaning, that that has to recover by itself”, says Jorge.
Seagrasses in Maron are one of the richer and more varied ecosystems in the coasts of Malaga, and there are only small portions of this plant species in the environment of La Caleta in Vélez and in Marbella. This ecosystem is shelter for all young fishes, place for spawning and farming area for many adult marine species. Besides, it produces the specimens that will move offshore.
To try to alert to the danger of disappearance these seagrasses are facing –they are real forests in the seabed- some years ago a platform to defend them was created. It is made up of specialists, biologists and naturalists.
In fact, this association is so desperate because of the situation in the marine setting of Maro that they wrote some letters to the Queen Sofía and Pope Benedict XVI. To him, to ask him for “prey for avoid more lost of ecosystem and more species than the ones already disappeared.”
Meanwhile, the Provincial Delegate of Environment, Remedios Martel, explained to SUR that she was not aware of these allegations of divers, but she highlighted the "efforts" of the Regional Government to try to combat illegal fishing. So, she remembered the installation of artificial reefs with concrete blocks.
