BEACHES in Spain have got the blues this year – more so even than last summer.
A year ago – well, 11 months, in fact – the country was awarded 589 blue flags for its beaches and another 99 for its yacht marinas and leisure ports, giving a total of 688; quite an achievement for the start of a summer which had been preceded by three months of total lockdown and was still facing major restrictions, including what was looking to be (and in the end, was) an almost total absence of foreign holidaymakers.
But even with this being the second year running that involved stringent safety criteria to prevent the spread of Covid-19 as part of the blue flag conditions, Spain has once again surpassed itself with a whopping 713.
Of these, 615 are for beaches, 96 for ports and marinas, and two for tourist sailing vessels.
And once again, Spain is the world leader for blue flags – it has been non-stop for 34 years now – even beating much larger countries with considerably more coast.
Naturally, Spain is always going to beat Portugal, Italy, Cyprus – and Malta, which is small enough that a fit person could walk from one end of the country to the other in a day – because of their size, but other popular European sunshine destinations such as Greece, Turkey and France have as yet failed to catch up with Spain since 1987.
Last year, beaches and ports in Spain mostly managed to hang onto their blue flags, with a small handful of new ones edging in; this year, the majority of coastal provinces have seen an increase.
The regions of Murcia, Cantabria and the Basque Country have kept the same number of blue flags as last year – 26, 11 and five respectively – as have the islands of Gran Canaria and La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, and the northern African coastal cities of Ceuta and Melilla, with 15, three, two and four respectively.
Blue-flagged beaches in land-locked provinces? Are you sure?
Madrid has retained its one blue flag and the province of Badajoz, in the land-locked western region of Extremadura, has kept its two blue-flag beaches.
Depending upon how observant you are, you may have noticed a bit of a dichotomy in the above paragraph: The capital city, north of the centre, and a land-locked western province have all kept their blue flag beaches? Did we really mean that?
Yes, we did, because the Greater Madrid region town of San Martín de Valdeiglesias has 14 kilometres of man-made beaches on the shores of the San Juan swamp, and one of these in particular, the splendid Virgen de la Nieve, has held onto its prestigious kitemark for four years on the trot; and the Badajoz towns of Cheles and Orellana la Vieja also built two lakeside beaches which look and feel so much like the real thing you would easily forget you were not on a sea coast.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com