There is no more desolate welcome for visitors landing in southern Gran Canaria and heading south than the sight of a "sea of wounded plastic." Kilometers of rusted structures and frayed polymers flutter in the wind like ghosts of a once-wealthy agricultural landscape, now just a skeleton. Faced with this nightmarish scene, the Southeast Intermunicipal Association has published the final resolution of its emergency plan: an in-kind subsidy to remove the waste that landowners have left to rot in the sun.
In Agüimes, the epicenter of the disaster is curiously concentrated in industrial areas. The Arinaga Industrial Park Joint Compensation Association leads the list of beneficiaries with three plots totaling more than 8 hectares of accumulated waste. It's the paradox of development: an industrial park that strives for cutting-edge technology but still carries the burden of greenhouses that are veritable open-air dumps. Even there, the neglect is such that some plots have been excluded because their concrete structures are in such a state of disrepair that they pose a death hazard to the cleaning crews themselves.
The journey toward this nightmarish scene continues in Ingenio, where the Ramírez Bosch family and their joint ownership will have to allow machinery access to more than 8,5 hectares of degraded land. The intervention on Dolores Rosa Ramírez's plot stands out, where up to 5 hectares of plastic waste will be cleared. These are areas that currently serve only as breeding grounds for garbage and present an image of utter neglect at the entrances to the towns, casting a "third world" shadow over an island that thrives on its aesthetics.
However, the largest "graveyard" of abandoned structures is located in Santa Lucía de Tirajana. There, the company La Vereda, SA—one of the major beneficiaries of European funds according to CAP records—now appears as the main protagonist of this cleanup plan. Work will be carried out on more than 15 hectares of its land to try to erase the traces of neglect. It is an urgent intervention on immense plots (some almost 10 hectares) that have remained abandoned while the image of the municipality deteriorated in the eyes of tourists traveling along the GC-1 highway.
This plan is, in reality, an acknowledgment of the landscape's aesthetic defeat. While companies like Maye Fruit SL and Inversiones Sanpe wait on the waiting list, the wind continues to tear apart the plastic sheeting of the structures that didn't make the cut. Southeast Gran Canaria is thus waging a battle against its own ghosts, desperately trying to ensure that, before the next TUI or Jet2 plane lands, the nightmarish image of abandoned greenhouses ceases to be the first and most bitter impression on those who visit the economic capital of the Canary Islands.
