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It takes a certain kind of person to spend four hours walking 15 kilometres of beach in the July heat, picking up the debris left behind by drug-running speedboats. Enrique Herrero is that kind of person.

 

The Seville-based teacher, known affectionately as 'Quique Bolsitas' (Quique the Little Bags) after years of visiting public spaces to collect litter and raise awareness about environmental damage, spent last weekend doing exactly that on the beaches of Doñana National Park.

 

What he found was, by any measure, alarming: more than 200 jerrycans of fuel, some of them still containing gasoline, abandoned on the sand and potentially sitting there for several months.

 

Herrero set off at 9.45am and finished around 1.45pm, timing his walk to avoid the worst of the heat. The jerrycans, used by the narco boats that run drugs along this stretch of the Andalucían coast, were spread across the full length of the beach he covered. The fact that many still had fuel in them made the situation not just an eyesore but a genuine environmental hazard, sitting inside one of Spain's most important protected natural areas.

 

This was not Herrero's first encounter with the scale of the problem here. Back in May, he carried out a similar clean-up on the banks of the Guadalquivir River, on the opposite side of Doñana National Park, and collected more than 500 jerrycans along with over 1,000 discarded tyres.

 

His frustration at the lack of official action is clear. "The situation is outrageous," he said, adding that he cannot understand why, if a single individual is able to organise and carry out a clean-up of this scale, "the competent authorities aren't doing it."

 

It is a fair question. Doñana is one of Europe's most significant wetland ecosystems, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to some of Spain's most threatened species. The idea that fuel cans from drug boats have been sitting on its beaches for months, requiring a teacher with a nickname and a sense of civic duty to remove them, says something uncomfortable about the gap between the park's protected status on paper and the reality on the ground.

 

 

Image: Rafael Minguet Delgado/Pexels