Formentera Council chief Jaume Ferrer and environment secretary Daisee Aguilera joined Aguilera's opposite number for the Govern balear in introducing the now two-week-old service to monitor anchorage on posidonia meadows.
Ferrer welcomed Vicenç Vidal's choice of Formentera to unveil the service, namely, he said, “because Formentera has been a pioneer in posidonia protection. For Formenterencs it's a top priority”. The CiF chairman highlighted the formal complaint the Council brought regarding the service's holdup, while adding that he understood administrative processes “can often take longer than we'd like”. Ferrer trumpeted the understanding his administration shares with its Palma counterparts, and pointed to a common objective of granting Formentera control of its entire coastline in the two or three next years. “We've got to do everything we can to insure surveillance and control of the watercraft that anchor on our coasts,” he said, and reiterated that the priority was safeguarding Formentera's sea floor and posidonia.
As Vidal pointed out, since the service's rollout patrol boats have already logged 546 relocations of boats anchored on seagrass meadows and 2,230 cases of outreach. Under the new scheme, 10 boats across the Balearics track large vessels anchoring along areas of sandy coastline. Focussing on ships 15 to 110 metres (m) long, the patrols, which communicate with crews via channel 68 about posidonia and proper anchorage, also assist watercraft in relocating from posidonia meadows to suitable anchorage spots. Forty-five thousand informative brochures have been drawn up in collaboration with Red Eléctrica de España (REE) as part of the effort. Six patrol boats will be stationed in the Pityuses until the end of September. For the first time this year, the area of surveillance will stretch from cala Saona to Es Caló with everything in between including Ses Illetes park. Three boats patrol the waters of Mallorca and one is posted at Menorca.
Formentera Council chief Jaume Ferrer and the Govern balear's secretary for environment, Vicenç Vidal, have paid a morning visit to the command centre of yesterday's cala Saona wildfire.
Jaume Ferrer, Jordi Vidal and Josep Verdera —the Formentera Council's chairman, the councillor of sports and the branch director at CaixaBank in Sant Francesc— metr to unveil the latest addition to the arsenal of equipment at the windsurfing school: a boat specially-designed for people with functional diversity.
The Formentera Department of Culture has announced the most recent item on the Sant Jaume/Diada de Formentera events calendar: the opening of Els pelegrins. Scheduled for today at 8.00pm in the Ajuntament Vell exhibition gallery, the show is built around locally-crafted work from the acclaimed Belgian artist —and La Mola resident— Michel Mouffe. The show's curator, Manolo de Oya of Espai F_, calls it a compendium of the constants that populate Mouffe's creative universe. The effect is art that draws the beholder in — not only to art history, but also philosophy.
Citing figures released by Aqualia, the Formentera Council has reported the island's June water use was 83,668 cubic metres (m3), or 7.73% less than last year, when it was 90,860m3. A downward trend marked the first half of 2017, when aggregate water use was 7.05% lower than the same period in 2016 (January to June). Particularly significant was the downtick in the water that was used by lorries during the month of June, 14.53% below last summer's figure.