For almost fifty years now there has been a debate about pollution, climate change, overpopulation, over-consumption and whether or not we are bringing doom upon ourselves. It began as a whisper, but now the swell of voices is rising, and in the virtual absence of corporate and governmental action, more and more people – among them the young who will inherit the earth from us – are trying to force change. At the core of this movement is the admittance that, regardless of whether or not we are causing global warming, we are turning this beautiful planet into a gigantic garbage heap.

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Living on or visiting the Marbella coastline, we spend a lot of time looking out to sea and surveying the horizon. In the distance, the outlines of Gibraltar and North Africa sometimes seem close enough to touch – and indeed, whether you take a ferry, yacht or make use of a new half-hour Ryanair flight from Málaga to Tetuan, Morocco is just a short distance away.

So close and yet so different; the short hop across the western edge of the Mediterranean opens up a world of discoveries and an insight into an exotic world of casbahs, minarets and the call of the muezzin. It’s all just on the other side of the water we are so familiar with, where historic cities and beautiful mountain ranges mirror those of Andalucía. Despite the impact on the senses of a place that still has an almost medieval feel in places, where the scent of spices and natural fragrances hangs in the air, there are also definite similarities with Andalucía, for if you’re familiar with the white-plastered villages of southern Spain you will come across places that bear the hallmarks of centuries of interaction between these two shorelines.

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