AMONG hundreds of fishermen confined to port yesterday by the Prestige oil spill was José Manuel Pasantes Castiñeira. He spent the day washing the hull of his boat with detergent, praying that the “black tide” breaking on Spain’s northwest coast would not worsen.

Five hundred miles away in Madrid, José María Aznar, the Spanish Prime Minister, was not in the mood for pouring oil on troubled waters. “It is very clear that the boat’s destination was Gibraltar,” he thundered in the face of repeated denials from Peter Torry, the British Ambassador, that any link between the doomed tanker and the colony was “complete nonsense”.

Since last Wednesday, when the Prestige, carrying a 77,000- tonne load, reported that it was in difficulties off the Galician coast, the Spanish authorities have been insisting that Gibraltar has played a malevolent role in what may yet turn out to be one of the country’s worst ecological disasters in history.

Quite what that role is, as diplomatic sources have pointed out, is as clear as the sporadic oil slicks decorating some of Galicia’s beaches.

Loyola de Palacio, Spain’s EU Transport Commissioner and sister of Ana de Palacio, the Foreign Minister, called it “yet another case of tax evasion, smuggling and inappropriate behaviour”.

The Spanish case seems to boil down to this: that the Prestige has visited Gibraltar in the past and no inspection of an allegedly dangerous and unsafe ship had been carried out.

But the British response is that the Prestige has only been anchored off Gibraltar — not in its port — once in the past four years and that on this occasion she was carrying Russian oil from Latvia to Singapore.

Madrid’s tirade against Gibraltar may have something to do with an Anglo-Spanish negotiation that appears to be in tatters after the colony’s rejection of joint sovereignty in a referendum held two weeks ago.

None of which helps Señor Castiñeira, who, at the age of 46, has enjoyed the first lie-in of his life thanks to the emergency and the decision by the regional government to keep its fishing fleet in harbour for the time being. “For the moment,” Señor Castiñeira said, “it’s not a disaster, but the wind is blowing in the right direction for it to bring more oil and if that happens I might be left without food and work for months.”

Señor Castiñeira relies upon the fanatical taste among mainland Spaniards for clams, octopus and goose barnacles — unappealing grey and red tentacles with a tasty interior that have to be hooked out with a pin. The closure to fishing of a 60-mile zone of the “Coast of Death” — so-called because of its notoriety for shipwrecks — means that the price of goose barnacles has rocketed and could go as high as £100 a kilo on the markets in Madrid.

Further east towards La Coruña there was scant evidence of the 93-mile (150km) streak of fuel oil lying off the coast that Spanish newspapers and television claim is afflicting Galicia. In Malpica, however, the oil lay like treacle on the narrow beach and a penetrating smell hung in the air as sailors from the naval base at Ferrol laboured to clear the waste.

“It started with a little stain on the horizon on Saturday and a terrible smell,” Dolores Alfeiral said, hanging out of the window of the Submarine bar overlooking the beach. “It spells ruin for us, everyone here works in fishing.”

Last night the Prestige was reported to have been towed 100 nautical miles offshore into Portuguese maritime territory, while permission was being sought for her to enter a port or continue southwards. Portugal refused, however, to let her dock in one of its ports.

“Our intention is obviously not to give authorisation to dock because this ship is the cause of an ecological disaster,” José Manuel Durão Barroso, the Portuguese Prime Minister, said.

Francisco Vasquez, the Mayor of La Coruña, said that he thought it better that the Prestige, having lost 4,000 tonnes of oil through a 35ft breach in her single-shell hull, be sunk or burnt at sea with phosphorous bombs. Her captain was in police custody in La Coruña, under suspicion of failing to co-operate with emergency rescue crews and harming the environment.

In Madrid, Señor Aznar’s intervention seemed to be designed to draw a response from Tony Blair, which as of last night has not been forthcoming.

Gibraltar accused Señor Aznar of “pure propaganda and political demagoguery”.

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