More than 4,000 people, including many unemployed mobilised by local authorities, pursue clean-up operations at the height of the tourist season and nine months after the oil tanker broke up, the newspaper said citing officials.

About 135 of the over 1,000 beaches between southern Galicia and the Spanish Basque country are still covered to various degrees by slabs of oil residue, the El Pais said.

As a result, 35 beaches on Spain's northwest coast have lost the blue flag, a European certificate which guarantees water quality at beaches.

Spanish Environment Minister Elvira Rodriguez insisted in late June that Spanish authorities "had not foreseen" that the fuel oil leaked from Prestige would continue to pollute the Atlantic coastal regions this summer.

She had attributed the reduced, but persistant pollution to oil "drifting in the Bay of Biscay".

Over 78,000 tonnes of oil waste have been cleared from beaches in northwest Spain since the Prestige went down off the Galician coast in November. Galician beaches alone received 51,235 tonnes, according to El Pais.

The wreck, lying 270 kilometres (170 miles) off the Spanish coast, still leaks up to one tonne of fuel oil every day and is said to contain another 37,000 tonnes of fuel oil.

About 40,000 tonnes have already leaked into the ocean.

Attempts to pump up the remaining fuel from the wreckage lying at a depth of 3,500 metres (11,550 feet) will start in September.

Robots will open the oil compartments and let the fuel flow into balloons which will then rise to the surface and be collected by oil tankers.

The break-up of the tanker on November 19 last year caused the worst oil spill yet to strike the Spanish coast. Its effects were also felt on France's Atlantic coast to the north.

TERRA.WIRE