Marchers protest handling of spill

TENS of thousands of angry demonstrators took to the streets of Galicia’s capital yesterday to protest at Madrid’s response to a tanker disaster as a new wave of oil began hitting beaches.

The streets of Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage centre in north-western Spain, were thronged with marchers upset by the destruction wrought on the region’s environment and fisheries by a huge oil spill from the sunken tanker Prestige.

Organisers of the march, held under the slogan Never Again, estimated that up to 200,000 people marched through driving rain under a sea of umbrellas.