Diego Tavero I Sevilla, (EFE) urgently, it prevented the arrival in Doñana of four cubic hectometres of acid water and another two of sludge loaded with heavy metals.
The rupture of the pond of the exploitation of the company Boliden Apirsa released on the Agrio and Guadiamar rivers acidic waters and toxic sludge. They contained arsenic, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals that caused the overflow of their channels. And the flooding of the adjoining lands along an extension of 62 kilometers.
In total, 4,634 hectares of agricultural and pasture areas in Aznalcóllar, Olivares, Sanlúcar la Mayor, Benacazón, Huévar, Aznalcázar, Villamanrique de la Condesa, Isla Mayor and La Puebla del Río were affected. All this while Seville in Andalusia celebrated its spring fair, the April Fair.
The sludge settled in the first 40 kilometers of the channel with a thickness that exceeded three meters in the vicinity of the pond. And they reached several centimeters at the entrance of the marshes. The acid waters reached the lower section of Entremuros and were retained at the gates of the Doñana National Park.
Those collected were deposited in the Aznalcóllar pit. In the first six months, 80 per cent of the spilled sludge was collected, but the spillage had penetrated some large diameter wells. Located in the aquifer that was pumped and lime was added to neutralize the acidity. On the day of the spill, the fish were jumping out of water whose pH was similar to that of a car battery.
Confrontation between the Government and the Junta
At that time, the central government was in the hands of the PP and the Junta de Andalucía in those of the PSOE. The first moments involved an open confrontation between the two administrations. And until three years later, mining in the area did not stop and the affected area – which was dedicated to agricultural work – was expropriated.
Despite the confrontation, the Urgent Measures Plan was created, activated by a Mixed Coordination Commission, in which both administrations were involved. In order to provide solutions to the two main fronts. The removal of the sludge and the sanitation of the volume of toxic water retained in the containment dykes.
A water treatment plant was built on the dikes. Through which the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation (CHG) eliminated heavy metals from the water and controlled the pH. After normalizing the state of the water, they were discharged into the Guadalquivir Estuary. And during the following weeks a control of the quality of the waters was carried out. Both surface and underground, as well as monitoring of air quality and the state of living beings.
The Commission also launched two initiatives to revitalize the area. ‘Doñana 2005’, from the Ministry of the Environment, and ‘El Corredor Verde del Guadiamar’, from the Junta de Andalucía. It was declared a Protected Landscape and attached to the Network of Protected Natural Spaces of Andalusia in April 2003. Until 2001, researchers did not locate the turning point by which the animal populations in the environment began to recover.
The Trial, in three months
On the 25th anniversary of the ecological disaster, which could have been even worse, the trial to determine the responsibility for the spill has not yet been held. It is set for just under three months. It starts on July 4th and Sweden’s Boliden Apirsa has managed to wriggle out, for now. of any type of responsibility, both criminal and civil.
The Andalusian Government figures the money allocated to the recovery of the Guadiamar between 1998 and 2003 at 89.8 million euros. The work focused on two large areas. 1,800 hectares of the Entremuros marshes, within the Doñana natural space, affected by acid waters, and the 3,000 hectares of the fluvial plain.
There will be six trial sessions during the month of July -4, 6, 11, 13, 18 and 20-, with 13 interrogations. It will finally determine if Boliden has to reimburse the expense of the environmental repair of the area that the Junta de Andalucía paid for.
During the investigation, the Swedish multinational assures that the economic impact suffered by the company due to that spill was 115 million. And that a total of 80 million have already been allocated to the “voluntary” removal of the sludge. Something that caused it to enter bankruptcy as a result of the expenses caused by the spill.
For its part, the Board, as plaintiff, bases its claim on Article 81 of the Mining Law, which holds the operator responsible for damages caused by their work by infringing the requirements established to protect the environment. Consider that Boliden did not complete the cleanup of the area. Something that the Swedish multinational rejects when considering that the application of this article is a “legal construction”.
An arduous legal dispute
Boliden assures that the Board has spent half the money it claims in “a green corridor.” And not in mitigating the consequences of the spill.
Boliden AB and Boliden BV even alleged a lack of passive standing. Since the alleged reimbursement “cannot be extended” to them since Boliden Apirsa was the operator of the complex.
The final setting of the trial for the month of July does not hide the arduous litigation that previously resulted in the defeats of the administrations. And with the recommendation, in May 2012, of the Supreme Court to the Junta to reinitiate the dispute by way of penalty. For which the court of Sanlúcar la Mayor came to charge about twenty technicians from Boliden, the Board and the Ministry of the Environment.
When this road was closed in 2000 and confirmed in 2001, the Junta then filed a civil lawsuit before the investigating court 11 in Seville. It was not admitted by declaring itself incompetent, so in 2004, the Governing Council agreed to impose a fine of 89.8 million euros on Boliden to be able to demand it through contentious-administrative channels. But the mining group appealed to the TSJA in 2007 and to the Supreme Court in 2011 and both instances agreed with it.
The Board, finally, asked the Chamber of Conflicts of Competences of the Supreme Court how it could demand the money from Boliden, which issued a civil order and ordered the case to be returned to Court 11 of Seville, the instance that instructed the first lawsuit and that on 29 September 2022 ended up setting the trial for July of this year.
The biggest ecological disaster in Andalusia
The trial will take place in six sessions, will have the testimony of twelve witnesses and an expert proposed by the three companies that are part of Boliden (Boliden Apirsa, Boliden AB and Boliden BV), all of them sued. They defend that the Andalusian Government had authorized in 1996 the regrowth of the raft that later broke.
The balance of this ecological disaster is seven million cubic meters of mud removed. 30 tons of dead animals. Contaminated aquifers. World record for concentration of heavy metals in waterfowl. Economic losses valued at around 120 million euros. And according to a study by the Universities of Granada and Almería, 7% of the affected land still has high levels of heavy metals such as arsenic or lead.
The legislation also evolved as a result of the Aznalcóllar disaster with the Environmental Responsibility Law of 2007, which regulates responsibility, basically under the principle that “those who pollute pay”.
Aznalcóllar served to develop a general application standard on soil contamination in the EU that did not exist until now and there were no emergency plans or security procedures.
And in the middle of the judicial labyrinth, the municipality of Aznalcóllar asks for a solution that allows the reopening of the mine, which could employ a thousand people. The Board began the procedures in 2015 due to the interest of several companies to take over the exploitation, but one of the companies that had entered into the competition appealed the award of the project, denouncing various irregularities, which led to the initiation of another judicial process.
The future exploitation of the mine
This new judicial process, which will be elucidated in March 2025, will bring to the bench the person in charge of Mining and fifteen other defendants, including two exalted officials of the regional Administration during the term of Susana Díaz, for an alleged manipulation in the adjudication of the exploitation of the Aznalcóllar mine.
The Board had awarded the exploitation rights to the México-Minorbis business group, in which the Andalusian company Magtel participates.
Organizations such as Ecologistas en Acción, Greenpeace, SEO/BirdLife or WWF consider the reopening of the mine unfeasible and seek a transition that allows a balance between the environmental and the economic reactivation of the region.
However, from the Junta de Andalucía -now in the hands of the PP- considers that the reopening will increase the important weight of the Andalusian mining sector and that we are in the last step of the administrative authorization process, so it could be reopened this year and that it works at full capacity in 2026.
On the Saturday of the April Fair in Seville in 1998, Miguel Ferrer, director of the Doñana Biological Station until the year 2000, received a call announcing the spill and remembered that the Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville (IRNAS) had already warned in 1984 that heavy metal leaks were taking place.
Fourteen years later, the biggest ecological catastrophe occurred in Spain, behind the sinking of the Prestige ship in 2003. EFE