Having a whale of a time no more

A marine museum containing the largest collection of cetacean skeletons on display in Spain (13 of them) has shut down after being unable to meet its payments.

The Museo del Mundo Marino in Parque Dunar, Matalascañas, located inside the Doñana National Park - a major nature reserve in southern Andalusia - had opened in 2002 to help visitors learn more about the marine life in the Gulf of Cádiz.

The facilities cost six million euros to build and were run jointly by the city of Almonte (Huelva) and the Doñana 21 Foundation, which is part-funded by the Andalusian government.

But local managers say they only received a quarter of the 100,000-euro subsidy officially granted by the regional government, making it impossible to keep the museum open.

"The fire extinguishing units do not work, and in these conditions it's impossible to guarantee the safety of the workers and the visitors; we also have problems paying the electricity and water bills," says José Joaquín de la Torre, spokesman for the local government of Almonte, which is run by the Popular Party (PP) with support from the leftist coalition IU. The regional government of Andalusia is run by the Socialist Party, although upcoming elections could see a strong victory for the PP, according to opinion polls.

The city spokesman says Almonte has taken on the costs of paying employee wages for December, as well as the Christmas bonus. "We have taken on burdens that are not ours, but we can't do more," says De la Torre, claiming the regional environment chief had promised to release the remaining funds before year's end. De La Torre now blames Andalusian authorities for failing in their policies of sustainable development for this sensitive area. "You can't just create infrastructure, you also need to maintain it, and the government has forgotten all about its responsibilities."

Meanwhile, the latter holds that the subsidy is guaranteed, and that only some paperwork remains to be done. "The decision to close or not depends on the museum management, in which the city of Almonte holds a 50-percent stake," says José Juan Díaz Trillo, Andalusia's environment commissioner.

Juanjo Carmona of the World Wildlife Fund - which is also a partner in the foundation - says the museum's troubles are nothing new and that anyone could see this coming.

"Here, as elsewhere, infrastructure was built during the fat years without taking into account that they would have to be maintained. They also did not consider the seasonal nature of tourism in Matalascañas, where people come during vacations; nobody comes all this way just to see a museum, so that there were parts of the year when the only visitors were schoolchildren or people on other types of field trips," he says.