Spain's Eco-golfers Aim to Drive the Brown

As golfing tourists drive down freshly watered green fairways this summer, while the rest of Spain endures a devastating drought, a crusading eco-golfer has opened the country's first water-free course.

Paco López, a sports lecturer at a Madrid university, has designed a course that twists through dried-out grassland and past autochthonous trees, shrubs and aromatic herbs near the town of Quijorna, 20 miles west of Madrid.

Inspired by the first courses on linksland in Scotland and concerned about the sustainability of the 20 water-guzzling courses a year being built for tourists on the Spanish costas, he hopes the eco-golf concept will catch on.

"You only have to look at the origins of golf to realise that it was played in natural environments," he said. "In a country like Spain, with such a dramatic lack of water, we are proposing a new and different way of doing things."

His nine-hole course, owned by Quijorna's town council, has replaced greens with "browns". Greens may be added later, when the course is extended to 18 holes, but only these and the approaches would be watered - requiring between 5% and 10% of the water of a conventional course.

Mr López said the concept would allow golfers to appreciate real landscape. "The idea here is not just to enjoy the sport and take exercise but also to have contact with real nature and incorporate the idea of sustainable development."

The WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) has said that the hundreds of golf courses around the Mediterranean are a growing environmental hazard, with each consuming the same amount of water as a town of 12,000 people.

Although most golf courses in Spain are meant to use recycled water, Greenpeace claims that only two out of 28 in the Madrid region do so. Local water authorities began disciplinary procedures against 10 of the courses for illegal use of water earlier this summer.