The Greenhouse Effect

Four seasons in one day, people sometimes say when referring to New Zealand's climate. A similar statement holds true for Spain, particularly for the province of Almería, in the extreme southeast of the country: four continents in one day. And you don't even need a car to see all four of them. A bicycle will do.

It's somewhat of a shock to leave the Alpujarras mountain range—craggy peaks, remote hamlets, stunning vistas—and shoot straight into the suburban sprawl of Almería city, where it’s hot, dirty and noisy. The city doesn’t have much going for itself, apart from its location. The Alpujarras on one side, the Tabernas desert, home of the spaghetti Western, on the other. (You can still visit the set of A Fistful of Dollars in a place called Mini Hollywood…)

But the region’s main prize is Cabo de Gata, a vast parque nacional sporting low mountains and a string of secluded coves with some of Spain’s finest beaches. Some of them are easily accessible. You just park your car and lay your towel wherever you want. Others require a bit of effort (a steep climb down) or a lot of effort (a seven-kilometre hike through rugged terrain).

You’d think that this stunning scenery automatically generates a modicum of wealth for the region, but that’s not the case. Tourists tend to stick to the Granada side of the Alpujarras, and Cabo de Gata, being a protected area, doesn’t have the horrid seaside resorts you get up north.

Almería owes its new-found prosperity not to tourism but to some unconventional thinking. ‘Why,’ someone must have said one day, ‘you know what we should do here, in the most arid part of Europe? Grow tomatoes!’

And so they did. But not in the tidy glass greenhouses I grew up amongst in Holland. They use invernaderos here, a fancy word for something very basic: endless sheets of plastic. A shimmering sea of white as far as the eye can see. And while the characteristic glass greenhouses are rapidly disappearing from my home region—high costs, low return—the plastic sea in Almería keeps expanding. It’s guerrilla agriculture at its most effective.