SPAIN: Hundreds of people, many of them volunteers, are fighting frantically to clean up Galicia's spoiled coastline, reports Sean MacConnell
"We have too little time, too few resources and too much oil," the sad-looking man in yellow oilskins told us on Saturday as he prodded hopelessly at the oil-stained sand at his feet.
El Ferrol, north of La Coruña, had been bracing itself for what happened overnight when the first oil from the stricken oil-tanker Prestige rolled ashore on the beach.
The Playa de Doninos, the local beach, is vital to the economy of Ferrol, a tourist town relying heavily on visitors from France and the rest of Spain.
The locals had been praying it might escape the black cloak of crude oil from the spillage which has been spreading its dark shadow for 300 kilometres around Cape Finisterre. "We thought we might escape and kept a watch every night. First the birds with their oiled wings arrived and then on last night's tide we found the dead fish. Now the oil is here," said the local, who drives a taxi during the tourist season.
He said their beach was impossible to protect once the oil began to spread up the coast.
"Regional government has allocated troops and there are volunteers coming but I fear it will not be enough."
What was happening in Ferrol on Saturday was only a small part of the huge operation taking place, much of it voluntary, to try and save the wildlife and marine life.
At Betanzos, west of La Coruña, convoys of buses and lorries carried young people west to help with the clean-up and defence of the area.
In a café there, journalists were mistaken for international volunteers and given free coffee and meals despite our protestations that we were there to observe rather than help.
At Malpica, south of La Coruña, hundreds of volunteers, army personnel and local authority workers fought frantically to clean the beach which is covered with the black, highly toxic crude oil.
An American girl, Jo White, from Boston, stood crying in the middle of the busy scene. She had been a foreign language student in Barcelona until Wednesday, when she decided to come and help.
"I hitched across northern Spain and because I carried a sign saying what I was travelling for, they were queuing up to give me lifts," she said. She was unprepared for what she found. As she stood looking down on a dead herring gull, its wings sealed with oil, she could only cry with sadness and exhaustion.
Up close, the badly oiled beach was a depressing sight: a mixture of sticky gunge, dead and distressed birds and dead fish was set against a sullen sky oozing rain on a sea certain to bring in more oil on the next tide.
Throughout Saturday in La Coruña, the centre of the disaster, a series of protests were taking place by groups ranging from fishermen, fish-factory workers and Greenpeace.
With fishing already banned on almost all of the north coast of Galicia - the primary activity in the area, supporting more than 100,000 jobs - there was an air of gloom.
"This will mean the old men will not now be able to retire. They must go back out to the deep sea again," we were told by one fisherman, Mr José Caldera.
He explained that when deep-sea fishermen get enough money, they buy small boats or invest in fish-farms, so they can take life a lot easier and be closer to their families.
"That is now all gone and they must go back to sea again or watch their families starve - because we believe it could be 10 years or more before this is fixed," he said.