The British are finding out in 2026 that Gibraltar has decades dumping its wastewater into the sea without treating it. A report in The Guardian abounds in the problems it causes, such as seeing wet wipes floating on the beaches of both the Rock and its surroundings. What is striking is the response that the plain Government has given to this phenomenon. “The wipes come from neighboring Spain.” , but there are things that never change.
These “problems” of Gibraltar with water management have been going on for a long time. For decades, El Peñón has been alleging aspects such as the need to use sea water for its sanitation network. This, treating seawater in the network, means having a series of “problems” that “historically do not occur in other waste treatment plants in the world.” Despite this, the local urban planning office received the plans for the construction of a treatment plant.
It will be built in Punta Europa, the southernmost corner of the Rock, and its construction is promoted by the company ECO waters, which has obtained a 25-year contract to build and operate this infrastructure. Precisely in Punta Europa is where a good part of the untreated wastewater comes out of the more than 40,000 plains. Gibraltar, again, has always justified that this area has “a rapid natural dispersion”, alluding to the fact that the waves dilute and quickly move the spills away from the coast.
In 2017, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) already ruled that the United Kingdom was violating wastewater regulations, but it left Brussels no power to enforce its rules. Consequently, Gibraltar was also left unable to access aid from the European Investment Bank (EIB) that would have been essential to finance this infrastructure.
Wipes and compresses adrift: this is not the first time accusations have been crossed
That Gibraltar dumped its untreated waste into the sea was well known, to the point that even accounts on Twitter like They have been ironizing about this aspect for nearly five years. This account has become a historical repository in which residents of the Rock have been sharing the image of Punta Europa for years: long spots of cloudy water going out to sea or mountains of wet wipes piled on the beach sand. And the images cannot be smelled.
The surprising thing is that Gibraltar now ensures that many of those wet wipes come from “neighboring Spain.” It is not the first time that the plain Executive tries to play that card. In January 2024, the northern area of the east beach of the Peñón dawned full of wipes. “An investigation is underway. At the moment We cannot confirm that the origin of this material is Gibraltar“said a government spokesperson at the time.
It is not the first time that this curious exchange of reproaches has occurred. It is also not the first time that the lack of a wastewater treatment plant in the British territory has been focused on. Carlito Buhagiarthe businessman promoting the construction of a plant in the south of the Rock, also acknowledged on a local radio station that his employees had collected up to 80 tons of wipes cleaning the current sanitation network.
“To give you an idea, that is equivalent to 20 African elephants filled with wet wipes“he said in an interview with the GBClocal television. “Gibraltarians have to have a certain civic pride when it comes to flushing things down the toilet, ecosystems start there.”
In October 2024, Verdemar, the local association of Ecologistas en Acción, launched into the seas of the Bay of Algeciras to remove “buckets and buckets of wipes, sanitary pads and other remains of garbage from Gibraltar’s wastewater discharges.” “All this garbage accumulated in the seabed of the Special Protection Zone of the Eastern Straitfrom where it has been extracted near Punta Europa,” lamented the entity.
“The coastline is flooded with sewage and wipes from Gibraltar, dumped next to the Punta Europa lighthouse. More than one million cubic meters of dirty water and waste of all kinds are dumped into the Strait. The currents are taking them to the Alboran Sea, to the west of the Strait, or to the beaches of the Bay of Algeciras.” A phenomenon that British citizens have heard about this week.
