Despite freshly scoured beaches, the politics of oil shipping still trouble European waters. Jeffrey Tayler reports

Last fall, as storm clouds lowered and rain started to pound, I drove along the coastal road of northern Spain, from Santander into Galicia, toward the Costa da Morte. The ancient charm of the land made itself felt in curling wisps of fog, wavering curtains of drizzle, and verdant mountainside forests that for me recalled northern Europe—which is apt: Despite centuries of domination from Madrid, the Galicians, stubborn and industrious, have managed to conserve their unique, historically Celtic identity. My destination was the village of Finisterre—on a cliff-bound finger of cape jutting into the thrashing Atlantic. Known for its violent seas since ancient times, the "Coast of Death" has taken many mariners' lives, and its waters, as iron gray as the thunderheads churning above, are rarely still.

On November 13, 2002, from a position 28 miles north of this coast, the Prestige, an aging, single-hulled oil tanker carrying 77,000 tons of Russian heavy crude—industrial-grade fuel so contaminating that it is banned in the European Union—had radioed an SOS. Apostolos Mangouras, the Greek captain of the Prestige, claimed that his ship had collided with a floating object and sprung a leak. Rather than offer a port of refuge, Spanish authorities evacuated most of the crew by helicopter and sent tugboats to tow the derelict craft out to sea, apparently planning to abandon it in Portuguese waters. As the tugboats tugged, crude gushed into the ocean, and within a day of Mangouras's SOS the Prestige was trailing a 23-mile-long, 3,000-ton oil slick.

By November 19, the legendarily tempestuous seas overcame the 26-year-old vessel. It split in two and sank 133 miles west of Finisterre (which translates as "End of the World" in Galician). Over the next six months, at a depth of almost 12,000 feet, the wreck disgorged as much as 63,000 tons of crude—30 to 40 tons a day—into a highly biodiverse marine environment, killing fish, shellfish, plankton, and birds and threatening the fishing and shellfish industries along the Atlantic coast of Spain and France. As late as August 2003, about a ton of fuel was still escaping the wreck each day. For environmentalists, the Prestige suggested comparisons to the most ecologically damaging oil spill ever, that of the Exxon Valdez off Alaska in 1989, when about 38,000 tons of light crude polluted 1,100 miles of shore.

In mid-December, the Spanish government suspended fishing from the Costa da Morte to the French border; by early January, 654 of northern Spain's 1,064 beaches were splotched with crude. Ninety thousand fishermen faced financial ruin.

In port cities across the north, fishermen protested in angry mobs, demanding compensation. The Spanish government quickly agreed to pay them $42 per day as long as fishing was prohibited, and $519 to $624 a month more to clean up the spill. One fisherman in Laxe described the compensation to me as "una maravilla," given that it exceeded the money many would have made on the job and that it came during the winter months, when catches would have been low in any case, owing to bad weather. This maravilla lasted 120 days.