For our Lady of the Dew, and the natural paradise which surrounds her, April really was the cruellest month this year. The spring started with abundant flowering pastures, the like of which had not been seen for many years. It ended, prematurely, under a sheet of black and toxic mud.
Donana is the site of one of the world's most important nature reserves - and of one of Spain's most colourful religious rituals. Every Whitsun weekend, up to a million pilgrims flock to El Rocio, a white village which seems to float on the sandy margins of a great salt marsh. They converge on a cavernous basilica, the sanctuary of Nuestra Senora del Rocio, through the flat countryside, and across a nearby river, in a processions of hundreds of horse-drawn wagons. At about the same time, countless waterfowl and wading birds are using Donana as a different kind of sanctuary. It is the central, and essential, staging post on their journey from western Africa to northern Europe, and vice versa. Many other birds, such as the park's emblematic flamingos, stay to nest amid the sanctuary's 50,000 hectares of lagoons, dunes and virgin Mediterranean woodland, on the edge of the Guadalquiver estuary, south of Seville.
The rarest native species, such as the Imperial Eagle and the Iberian Lynx, fend off extinction thanks to the protection afforded by this vestige of an unspoilt environment, which seems more African than European in its wild fecundity. With its constantly shifting landscape of quivering light and subtle colours, the park would be precious even without its wildlife. With its birds and animals, it is priceless. UNESCO rates the park as among the most important in the world. After some crass proposals to exploit the area for commercial tourism were narrowly rejected in the 1980s, the park is, supposedly, cherished and protected by the Spanish authorities.
A long drought in the early 1990s had prompted fears that Donana's ecosystem would collapse. Then three year's generous rainfall topped up the water table, and restored the parkland to its primal glory. "Donana looks more vivid and alive, more mythical and seductive than ever," proclaimed El Pais in a celebratory article last April 5th.
Three weeks later, a little piece of earth moved in the hills, 40 km upriver from the park, and showed how fragile Donana's protected status really was. An unstable deposit of blue clay shifted under the wall of a reservoir which held heavy metal mining residues. In the early hours of Saturday, April 25th, part of the wall collapsed. Five million cubic metres of acidic water gushed out, followed at a more leisurely pace by an ooze of seven million tons of metallic sludge.
The tide of black mud, thick with zinc, copper, silver and lead residues, including arsenic, swept down the valley towards the Guadiamar river, which flows into the Guadalquiver system. Within a few hours, it had covered more than 35 km, and reached the "pre-park" zone. This area is almost as important ecologically as the national park, but enjoys a lower grade of protection. The core of the Donana water system lay just ahead, barely 2,000 metres from the head of the mud-stream.
En route, the effluent overflowed the riverbanks to a width of 500 metres. The acidic water burned rice fields and orchards. The mud left a suffocating toxic seal, six inches deep, on the rich topsoil. Hundreds of farmers woke to see their livelihoods swept away, not just for one year, but for at least one generation. To preserve the good name of the rest of Andalusian agriculture, no crops will be harvested for many years where the toxic mud has lain.
One of the most cherished moments in the Rocio pilgrimage takes place across this stretch of the Guadiamar, at a point known as the "Burning Ford". By the Saturday evening, the white canopy of the small shrine which marks the crossing stood out starkly against a black background, in which the river was indistinguishable from the land. Three weeks later, the pilgrims would be instructed, for the first time ever, to make a huge detour around the ford. The concentration of toxins in the water, earth and air could seriously damage their health, local authorities said.
Downstream, the Herculean task of halting the stream of poison began on the dawn of the disaster. An existing system of dykes fortunately contained the flood within an area known as "Entremuros" - between walls. Bulwarks rapidly thrown up across Entremuros prevented the effluent from penetrating the national park itself. The heart of Donana had been saved - in the short term.
Over the next few days, Spain, and the wider world, watched in horror as clashing bureaucracies paralysed further emergency work, and the toxins seeped through to the water table under the park. Spain's regionalised political system allowed the Madrid minister for the environment to blame her counterpart in the Andalusian autonomous government, and vice versa. Even among committed ecologists and naturalists, however, there was bitter controversy.
Should the army be called in to take out the toxic mud by the spadeful, or should the clean-up be done with heavy machinery? Should the acidic water be contained and purified, or should it be channelled quickly into the estuary where the Atlantic might absorb it? "There was great tension. Old friends became enemies overnight," Hector Garrido, one of the park's ornithologists now recalls.
While everyone argued, birds flocked into Entremuros, attracted by the rapid growth in vegetation stimulated by the minerals, once the water acidity dropped. To the rare Purple Gallinule, an exotic version of our humble moorhen, nesting conditions had never looked so good. Whether the exceptional number of chicks they raised are normal, however, remains to be seen. Could the catastrophe actually turn out to have been good for wildlife?
"People think that, if no birds die immediately, nothing's wrong," says Hugo Lefranc, a park technician, as he drives bumpily along a giant dyke at Entremuros to take soil samples. On one side there are uncontaminated rice fields, on the other reed-beds flourishing in polluted water. The pristine egrets and white storks which feed there cannot distinguish between them. "Within 20 days of the disaster," says Lefranc, "we found that 500 stork chicks nearby had absorbed arsenic traces from their parents' diet."
Since then, the concentration of copper in certain ducks has risen thirty-fold. The glossy ibis, a bird which featured in Egyptian mythology, returned to nest in Donana after a 55-year absence three years ago. By last April, nesting numbers had risen from seven to 70 pairs. Every bird tested was found to have arsenic in its bloodstream this year.
No one knows how significant such facts are for the future. But there are clues. Local farmers were initially delighted to see sunflowers shooting up directly out of the toxic mud, to twice their normal height. Life sprang from death, it seemed. Then it was discovered that the new, improved sunflowers often bore no fertile seeds.
Whatever about the future, the summer became a frantic rush to clear away as much of the mud as possible, before the autumn rains swept the toxins directly into the park. The various authorities sorted out their differences, and Boliden, the company which owns the offending mine, pitched in to make the clean-up a remarkable success. In the short term.
"I have to admit that the impossible has become the incredible," says Hector Garrido, who makes regular flights over the area doing bird counts. "The black stain on the Guadiamar has turned to brown and green again."
Boliden had its own agenda. Established by Swedes, it is now largely Canadian owned. "Pollution is a very delicate question for the Swedes and Canadians," says Antonio de Alejandro, a Boliden spokesman. The shareholders were restless. Damage limitation became an urgent priority.
The company committed most of its workforce, and all its huge fleet of lorries, to the clean-up operation. Luckily, in this instance, the autumn rains have not arrived. Six months later, the lorries are still grinding up the dusty road from Entremuros. Their cargoes are covered with fine netting, in an attempt to prevent the mud, already baked in the summer heat, from dusting off into the atmosphere. Air pollution has risen above EU-permitted levels in local villages. "I'm not an expert, but we are assured there has been no danger to public health," says de Alejandro.
Meanwhile, the lorries are dumping tons of sludge into the "cut", the enormous open-cast mine from which the minerals were originally extracted. The poison has been returned to its source, and even in the Andalusian sunlight, the cut looks like Dante's Inferno on a bad day.
Deep green and dark orange soups curdle slowly in the bowels of the earth. Weird vegetation finds a kind of life on the surface. As though to feed the monster below, thousands of bales of hay are suspended in a net on the precipice above the cauldron. Taken from contaminated cattle feeders, they have to be dropped into the cut piecemeal, because no one is sure how this organic matter will react with the mineral sauce.
Alejandro de Antonio can marshal an army of statistics to show how well Boliden has behaved. Ninety-eight per cent of the toxic mud has been collected by 400 lorries, and safely stowed away in the cut. Some £23 million has been set aside to meet claims. Without accepting liability, the company has paid out a total of £5 million u500,000 to compensate the farmers who lost a harvest. Furthermore, he says, Boliden was not responsible for the disaster. Since it took over the mine in 1987, it had taken every precaution, complied with every environmental requirement. How on earth, then, did all hell break loose last April?
"We had retained the services of a Spanish engineering company to check the safety of the reservoir. We believe that the studies they gave us did not take adequate account of subterranean instability under the wall of the reservoir."
This is contested by the Spanish company, and that is only part of a complex court battle about compensation, which could last 10 years. Boliden has commissioned an independent report which vindicates its case. Two other reports are still awaited by the court. Not surprisingly, Boliden's commitment to the cleanup was not entirely motivated by ecological zeal. The company wants to open a new mine, just up the road from the old one, on December 15th. The Andalusian government is believed to be about to approve Boliden's request.
"Mining is necessary for all of us," de Antonio says. "Without it, you wouldn't have your car." It is also necessary, he argues, for the 2,000 local families who depend on Boliden for a livelihood, in a region of Spain ravaged by unemployment. "Of course Donana is important, but you can't juxtapose the interests of that many people to the existence of a bunch of ducks in the park."
Even if it were just "a bunch of ducks", however, that is not an either/or decision. Nor will Boliden provide local employment once the new vein is exhausted, in 20 years' time. Francisco Vilchef, of Andalusian Ecological Action, which represents local conservationists, has an alternative proposal. The mine should be closed for good, but its workforce could be employed in a plant to purify the contaminated residues, which would take many years. Above all, he opposes Boliden's plan to use the cut as the reservoir for the residues of the new mine. There is no guarantee, he says, that they will not seep into the water-table below, poisoning drinking water in the region, and ultimately the whole food chain of Donana.
Alejandro de Antonio insists there is no danger whatsoever of a new disaster. "Rock is, as you know, impermeable per se," he declares baldly. Not, as any schoolboy might tell him. But Vilchef argues that even if we did know that all the rock in the cut was impermeable, it is likely to have been fractured by previous mining operations. De Antonio says that independent studies show there are no cracks in the cut, and that there never will be. Such studies also said the old reservoir was secure for all time.
"We know where this started, we don't know where it will end," says Luis Garcia, the senior ornithologist in the scientific studies centre at the park. "But this is an international question. Geese which have fed on contaminated grass will be in 10 different countries soon, they will be on your Irish pastures. We need an international commission to solve the problem."
Miguel Angel Bravo, a technician at the centre, points out that even though the cleanup has been, on the surface, more than 95 per cent successful, the remaining mud is still a big threat to the park, if it rains heavily. Of course, drought is Donana's other nemesis. "Now we're damned if it rains," says Bravo, "and we're damned if it doesn't."
If Our Lady of the Dew was an earth goddess, she would surely weep. Or, as Hugo Lefranc put it, considering all the elements of the catastrophe: "Whoever classified humanity as homo sapiens (rational man) got it utterly wrong."