HUNDREDS of dead fish have appeared in a Marbella river leaving environmentalists scratching their heads as to what caused the mass die-off.
The fish appeared where the Guadaiza River opens up into the sea, having seemingly died due to ‘asphyxiation’.
The Guadaiza river passes through Nueva Andalucia and meets the Mediterranean at the heart of the paseo between San Pedro and Puerto Banus surrounded by popular beach bars.
The river is a protected Special Area of Conservation (SAC), and the council invested over €2.6 million into ecological restoration last year, hoping to protect the river’s ecosystem.
However, this mass death of fish is pushing questioning into the environmental issues the river still faces.
The initial hypothesis was that the fish suffocated due to lack of oxygen.
“It may have been due to a school of fish entering the area during a high tide” a council spokesperson said.
“When they were trapped as the tide went out, they died from lack of oxygen in the freshwater.”
Authorities have also not ruled out that the fish died due to pollution or a toxic spillage in the river.
Water samples are currently being analysed by water utility company Hidralia and the Andalucian health department.
The dead fish have been cleared from the lake, and sent off to be incinerated while the investigation continues.
As a precaution, the council has used machinery to widen the route where the river meets the sea, in order to ‘promote water renewal and circulation and completely minimize any potential risk to the sandy area, should a spill ultimately be confirmed’.
Despite this, the council has been challenged by environmentalists, who claim that they are avoiding taking the blame for the incident.
Ecologistas Malaka, an environmentalist group based in Malaga, accused the council of purposefully blocking the opening of the river into the sea for aesthetic and practical reasons.
“If there’s a problem with the water, it ends up being closed so the beach is continuous and people don’t have the inconvenience of having to cross the river,” an Ecologistas Malaka spokesperson said.
The group pointed out that the city council ‘should be maintaining a continuous water line’, in order to ensure the safety of the river’s numerous species, which include mullet, barbel, and eels.
The town hall and the Junta deny these allegations.
Investigation into the exact cause of the fish’s death is still pending, awaiting laboratory test results.
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