Almería isn't tropical: that's why Spain's greenhouse region needs them

Almería doesn't have a tropical climate: that's why it lives off greenhouses

Tomatoes that taste of cardboard and melons that taste of cork are back in the dock. The complaint is an old one, and so is the popular diagnosis that comes with it: "if Almería has a tropical climate, why all that plastic?" The second charge can be dismantled with a map.

Almería lies almost 1,500 kilometres north of the Tropic of Cancer. Its climate is arid Mediterranean, with desert-like antiestéticatures in regions such as Tabernas and a water shortage that conditions any kind of farming. A tropical climate requires, by definition, average temperatures above 18 degrees every month of the year. Here there are four seasons, not two. Tropical? Not at all.

What the plastic over the fields is really for

A greenhouse is not a giant stove. Depending on the type of mesh, it builds the microclimate each crop needs and, in many cases, does the opposite of what intuition suggests: it protects the fruit from sunshine that would scorch it. The key lies in the combination with aridity. The dry, bright climate of Spain's south-east is what multiplies yields under cover. The blanket doesn't make up for a bad climate; it squeezes the most out of an excellent one.

From this comes the underlying economic rationale: several harvests a year. Without a greenhouse, tomatoes would be a summer product. With one, there are vegetables twelve months a year — exactly what city dwellers ask for when they open the fridge in January.

Flavour is decided by the seed, not the cover

Here the matter becomes more uncomfortable for the consumer. A tasteless tomato is not tasteless because it grew under plastic, but because it is a commercial variety bred to survive transport and the supermarket shelf. Full-flavour varieties turn soft within two days; the ones that last a week at home are bland by design. Anyone demanding perfect fruit on the shelf twelve months a year is asking, without realising it, for fruit that tastes of little.

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Glass and robots versus plastic and day labourers

And then there is the industrial front. The comparison that hovers over the issue is the Netherlands: with a worse climate, it produces four times more per cultivated hectare, using glass greenhouses and a level of robotisation that is already standard there. The Almería model, intensive in plastic and manual labour, wins on cost and loses on productivity per square metre. Automating would require investment, and that's where the argument gets stuck: the very margin that makes the system competitive is what discourages changing it.