It is a dry, arid land, dotted with scrubland, cacti, and white rockrose. And suddenly, from the barren landscape emerges an immense white expanse almost 30 kilometers long, guarded by the Gádor mountain range and the Mediterranean Sea. This is Almería's sea of ​​plastic, the great vegetable garden of Europe, where nearly 100,000 workers labor, most of them immigrants, and about 30% of them undocumented. In total, there are some 35,000 hectares of greenhouses—the equivalent of 50,000 football fields combined—that can produce up to 3.5 million tons of vegetables and fruits: peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini... Tens of thousands of greenhouses engulf everything, penetrating the towns and cities of the region, white plastic sheets visible from space, blending in with houses and industrial buildings. It is the economic engine of the region: on one side the western area, surrounding El Ejido; on the other valley, the vast esplanade at the foot of the municipality of Níjar.

"Hamsa, I don't see you at school." Joaqui Salord stops a young Moroccan man walking in flip-flops despite the harsh winter weather near Barranco del Búho, a filthy pit of garbage and plastic. The scene repeats itself a few minutes later, as the veteran Jesuit walks among the shacks of Don Domingo de Arriba, in Atochares, a settlement where nearly 600 people live. Kofi cleans his mud-caked clothes while listening to the radio in the background. The stains aren't even concealed by the Ghanaian veteran's meticulous brushing. The same question is posed, and Kofi, battered by poverty and emaciated from two years living among ruins, excuses himself by saying he missed the small open-air classroom the Jesuits run to teach Spanish to immigrants. Atochares is the largest settlement in the province of Almería. The lack of housing for those working in the greenhouses of the "sea of ​​plastic" has led to a proliferation of these substandard dwellings. In the Níjar Valley alone, in the Levante region of the vast "Orchard of Europe," there are almost fifty.

The mayor of Badalona, ​​​​Xavier García Albiol, He requested authorization on Friday to evict the homeless people who live in squalor under the C-31 bridge. He says that no former residents of Institut B9 remain—where he carried out a controversial eviction that literally left dozens of vulnerable people out in the cold during a severe cold snap—because they have all now been rehoused. Many of those people, like those now seeking to be displaced again without any consideration, are undocumented immigrants who, in many cases, work precariously and have great difficulty finding a place to live. Either because they cannot afford it or because they simply do not want to rent. It is the vicious cycle for undocumented immigrants, and for many who are documented, who, despite having jobs, cannot find a way to access decent housing. Hence the settlements that are proliferating everywhere and that are returning to the Catalan, and Spanish, landscape the image of large camps of shacks without the most basic services.

A 5.5 magnitude earthquake struck southern Spain on Monday morning. According to the National Geographic Institute (IGN), it occurred at 7:13 a.m. off the coast of Almería between Cape Palos and Cape Gata, approximately 32 kilometers offshore, taking the municipality of Níjar as a reference point.