Participants:  Four Spanish teachers.  Fifty Spanish students

As every year since 1995, the students of the Arroyo Hondo high school went to the shore sea to check the enviromental situation of our coast.

Coast Watch is a European Program that wants to implicate our youth people in the concerns regarding the quality of the European coasts. In order to achieve this, the procedure is to divide the coast in 500 m segments near the implied centers, and then asign each segment to a little team of four or fift students. The students then check the type and frequency of any kind of contamination, look for invasive vegetation or dead animals, and impact caused by human activities.

This year, with fifty students, a length of 5 km. of beach was checked. The results was consistent with studies of the the past years, and consisted to the extreme reduction of contaminants like bottles, plastic bags, nets and human wastes, thanks to the city council policy of intensive beach claening. However, there were other worries growing apparently. These were:

• An increasing extension of the foreing vegetation

• A very serious increasing of the coastal erosion

• The urban pressure, in most cases illegal.

• The effects of the heavy air traffic of the Rota Naval Station in the animals of the shore, specially the breeding birds.

As matters of the Comenius Projects, all these enviromental challenges were specifically worked out during this year's CoastWatch edition, and the results are exposed in the web site.