text: Intermediate 
  The view from the visitors centre at the southern edge of Donana National Park in southern Spain is an ornithologists dream: 200,000 hectares of wetlands vital for the birdlife of western Europe. Dozens of Britains most loved migratory birds rest here every year on their migrations from Africa. Donana is also home to some of Europes rarest birds, including the Spanish imperial eagle.
  It is a glorious, vibrant landscape but it exists on a knife-edge. In 1998, almost two billion gallons of acidic water, mixed with waste metals, poured into the park from the Los Frailes mine 45km away. A toxic tsunami of waste poured down the Guadiamar river into the park. More than 25,000 kilos of dead  sh were collected afterwards and nearly 2,000 adult birds, chicks, eggs and nests were killed or destroyed.
  It was Spains worst environmental disaster and the clean-up cost 90m. Suddenly aware of Donanas status as the nations most important natural site, Spain decided to spend a further 360m, some of it EU money, on restoring the landscape. In the 1950s and 60s, some parts of this landscape had been drained to create rice and cotton  elds. Some of this farmland is now being returned to its original wetland state.
  It has been a costly but positive process. But Donana is still in trouble thanks to the increasing pressures of modern life. There are plans to build an oil pipeline through Donana and other developers want to build new hotels and golf courses, which would need enormous water supplies. Sand and soil washed from nearby farms is also blocking the channels that cross Donana.
  However, the real body blow for conservationists has been the recent decision of the Andalucian government to reopen the Frailes mine that nearly destroyed Donana in 1998. This is Europes most precious bird sanctuary, for indigenous species and also as a resting place for birds that migrate between Africa and Britain and other parts of north-west Europe, says Laurence Rose of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Donana already faces a large number of threats, but now they want to bring back the very cause of the disaster 16 years ago. It is extremely worrying.
  The state of the local economy provides an explanation for the governments decision. The crash of Spains banks in 2008 had a catastrophic effect on the region and unemployment in some parts of Andalucia is now more than 30%. Reopening the mine would provide more than 1,000 jobs.
  There are riches here, riches that are badly needed by local inhabitants, said energy spokesman Vicente Fernandez Guerrero. We think mining is a good way to make it possible to allow local people to continue to live in the area. This is a mining area. People have been digging metals here since Roman times.
  Fernandez said that the mine licence would only allow modern mining techniques, which avoid the creation of poisonous wet waste. Also, the Canadian company that ran Los Frailes when the disaster happened cannot run it again. The best technology in the world will be used here, Fernandez insisted. Liquid will not be used. We are going to insist on that.
  The plan has some support in the area, but it also has a lot of opposition. Carlos Davila, who works for the Spanish Ornithological Society in Donana, was also alarmed at the plan. This is a very, very bad idea, he said. They say the new mine will be safe, but they said it was safe in 1998 and look what happened. We got the worst ecological disaster in the history of Spain.
  Almost every visitor at a local restaurant had a camera and telescopic lens or a pair of binoculars. There is a big tourist trade because of the birdlife of Don_ana. This is not surprising because this is a very special place. A huge sky hangs over this  at but certainly not boring landscape. Birds of every shape and size  ll the air and sometimes the road. At one point on my visit, a stork calmly stood in front of our car until it felt ready to  y off.
  The trouble is that Spain does not have the public resources it had 16 years ago. A repeat of the toxin spill today would have a much, much more damaging impact, said Rose. This point is supported by Davila. After the disaster, Spain realized that it had a place of real ecological importance and did a lot to clean it up and protect it, he added. Now, we seem to be forgetting that lesson. It is very depressing.