by Marianne Braun
Every year in August and September in Castile in Spain is the theatre for many popular festivals drawing droves of visitors.
It is a tradition to celebrate for a week - whether to commemorate the life of a saint or the Virgin - with processions, sports competitions, bulls, good food and drink, dance and music at all hours.
In this connection, a member of Mundus maris has organised a celebration in the garden of a residential community in Hoyo de Manzanares near Madrid.
There was no shortage of home-made food and drinks.
The peculiarity of this encounter between about 60 neighbours was a small exhibit on the topic: Plastic and sea.
Some pictures showed the catastrophic situation in some coastal cars and maps with the so-called "Seventh Continent" (agglomerations of plastic garbage in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans).
This was accompanied by information sheets with data about the importance of the Oceans and seas for human beings, the volumes of plastic litter in the seas, the garbage in the Mediterranean, the consequences for the fisheries and finally the big question: What can we DO about this?
Armed with this information, the older and younger neighbours took then part in a quiz, which consisted of eight questions. At the end, the first 10 winners received (most of them were children and teenagers) a bag made from organic cotton as a prize.
It was a pleasant and interesting summer afternoon. People gathered in a friendly atmosphere and extended using their knowledge about the environment. A grain of sand in the sea of the efforts of Mundus maris to help us all restore the often lost links with the sea and the whole of nature of our blue planet.
The photos are by the author.