TOLEDO, SPAIN — A frayed copy of "Don Quixote" was tucked under the front seat of Roberto Oliveros' battered white truck as he sallied forth through the fast-changing plains of central Spain.
Where the addled Cervantes hero tilted at windmills, Oliveros and his environmentalist friends see another towering enemy dotting this La Mancha landscape: construction cranes.
An unbridled building boom, which first turned much of Spain's once captivating coastline into a mile-wide belt of shopping malls, vacation homes and sunburned foreigners, has more recently spread deep into the country's heartland, endangered some of the most precious and diverse flora and fauna in Europe and sucked an already arid region dry of water.
Nearly 30% of Spain is in the process of becoming desert, according to a report by Adena, Spain's branch of the World Wildlife Fund.
"We have tried to raise the alarm, before everything goes to hell," said Oliveros, from the Toledo office of Ecologists in Action, Spain's largest consortium of environmentalist groups.
Fueled by corruption, speculation and a hot market that only recently cooled, vast patches of regions such as Castilla-La Mancha are being swallowed up by enormous housing developments, often on land designated as national parks or as protected zones because of delicate ecosystems and near-extinct wildlife.
Once a quiet countryside of gentle hills, olive groves, medieval castles and cattle ranches, the land is now pocked with patches of cookie-cutter condos, golf courses and prefab swimming pools. And billboards: "Get your chalets now!" "Easy credit, no money down!" "A new way to live!"
And the most bitter twist for environmentalists is that an abrupt downturn in the Spanish economy, not unlike the current U.S. financial crisis, means that most of the tens of thousands of new houses will go unsold.
Spain caught a roaring case of property fever a few years ago; owning a home became part of achieving the European dream in a nation catching up with the rest of the West. Compounded by an influx of British and other foreign second-home buyers, demand soared, prices soared even higher, and greed infected the boom.
Backroom rezoning has stolen property from under the feet of small landowners and farmers. Building permits have been granted where there is no possibility of water or sewerage infrastructure.
