a lot of these ships are real environmental bombs and so we must fight this

Ana Palacio

Speaking a week after a huge oil spill from the tanker Prestige started coming ashore, Ms Palacio said they would demand European support.

"The Galician coast is like the M-30 [motorway around Madrid], it's one ship after another", she told a conference in Barcelona on the European Union and the Mediterranean.

Local delicacies have been affected

"Obviously a lot of these ships are real environmental bombs and so we must fight this".

The current maritime corridor extends two nautical miles (3.7 kilometres) off the coast. Moving it further away could help reduce the threat to vulnerable coastal regions from tanker spillages.

Activists from the environmental group Greenpeace protested at local government offices in Galicia on Saturday over what they see as their lack of action in the face of catastrophe.

They left buckets of the toxic black sludge - which is washing up on Galicia's beaches - outside regional government offices with a sign reading "Oil kills".

Submarine sent

Better weather on Saturday helped teams in north-western Spain working to clean more than a hundred beaches sullied by oil spilled from the Prestige which went down on Tuesday.

Hundreds of soldiers, students and volunteers are trying to clear away the oil, which is harming wildlife and placing the future of the region's fishing industry at risk.

The Spanish Government has commissioned a French submarine to dive to the ocean floor to check whether oil is still leaking from the wreck of the Prestige.