The past year has been "a black one for the Spanish coast -- and not just owing to oil", Greenpeace Spain's director Juan Lopez de Uralde said as he unveiled the group's annual report.

Out of 1,684 beaches bearing signs of pollution 1,137 had been soiled as a direct result of the Prestige disaster, which caused the worst ever oil slick to hit the Spanish coastline.

"Eight months on, 2,000 out of 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) of Spain's shoreline remain contaminated," Greenpeace noted, saying tonnes of fuel continued to wash around off the Spanish coast.

Lopez de Uralde decried the absence of a "strategic plan to deal with this situation".

The Prestige tanker sank off Spain's northeastern coast, spilling thousands of tonnes of heavy fuel oil and wreaking environmental havoc in northern Spain, and to a lesser degree in Portugal and southeastern France.

The ship eventually went down 270 kilometres off the Galician port of Vigo, with an estimated 35,000 tonnes of oil still trapped inside.

Greenpeace said 205 other sites were polluted by sewage, particularly at Las Palmas on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, where 50 percent of raw sewage flows directly out to sea.

And the organisation warned that if the government did not get to grips with the problem, pollution would "kill the goose which lays the golden eggs of tourism", Spain's most lucrative industry.

TERRA.WIRE