From the window of a plane, or the vantage point of a migrating bird, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the Campo de Dalías for an alpine snowfield or an errant polar ice floe. But here, on the southern margin of the Andalusian coast, the temperature has never dropped below freezing, and snowfall has not been seen since 1935.

The pale sprawl is in fact a vast maze of greenhouses, composed of wire frames and covered with bright white plastic. Spain’s el mar de plástico—the plastic sea, as it’s known—covers more than 30,000 hectares of land in the Gulf of Almeria. Like the cooling dam at Chernobyl, or Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, it is visible from space. 

Almeria has been farmland since the time of the Umayyad caliphate—Campo de Dalías is derived from the Arabic word daliyah, meaning “vine”. But the geography of the region has historically been unkind to farmers. The towering peaks of the Sierra Nevada and Sierra de Gádor mountain ranges to the north block rain clouds from reaching the coastal plains. Water is scarce (rain falls on average fewer than 50 days a year), and the Levanter wind tears across the plains, sometimes at over 100kph (62mph).

The plastic sea developed in response to these unfavourable conditions, beginning as a handful of simple shelters to shield local crops against the elements. In the 1960s pioneering farmers realised that plants hidden under plastic grew faster and more successfully, and began constructing greenhouses.