Madrid - Near Muxia, a peaceful fishing village at the heart of Spain's so-called Costa da Morte or Coast of Death, police seized 4 tons of pure cocaine early this year. On a beach on Spain's northwest Atlantic coast, the drugs - presumed to have come in from Colombia - were nabbed as they were being brought in on a speedboat ferrying them from a ship. Two people were arrested in January.
The spate of raids and drug arrests in Spain reflect the country's status as the world's second-largest consumer of cocaine.
According to a 2009 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Spain ranks just behind Scotland at the top of the world's heaviest cocaine users.
In Spain, 3 per cent of people aged 15-64 are estimated to have used the drug in 2007, with 3.8 per cent in Scotland in 2006. The European average over the past years has been about 1 per cent.
In the Atlantic, some 800 nautical miles from the Canary Islands, Spanish tax authorities seized a fishing boat in February manned by five Venezuelans carrying 5 tons of cocaine.
According to investigators, this haul was also on its way to drug gangs on the Galician coast.
Despite the success of such operations, police know they have a long fight ahead in the decades-old drug war in northwestern Spain.
The Galician rias - the long, narrow tidal outlets along the coast - have traditionally supported the main industries of fishing and seafood farming. Smuggling provided extra income in years of scarcity - first it was canned food, then came tobacco, and finally cocaine, a treacherous business that has, with the help of Colombian drug cartels, transformed Galician drug clans into millionaires.
The gangs with their speedboats and increasingly modern equipment have helped turn Spain into the main European gateway for the white powder that comes from South America's Andean nations.
According to the US State Department, Colombia is the main supplier of cocaine to Spain, although other data suggest that shipments from Bolivia are increasing, by ship and plane, via Venezuela or Argentina.
Experts link the increase in cocaine consumption to dramatic changes in Spanish society after the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Young people who gather to party on weekends at bars or nightclubs, or in open-air drinking areas, say it's easy to get drugs.
"At any party you can get ecstasy tablets," said one student near the Moncloa metro station, a favourite area for Madrid's youth. Many ecstasy users have moved on to "doing a line" of cocaine.
"Cocaine is nowadays the main cause of hospital emergencies related to the abuse of illegal drugs," said Dr Benjamin Climent, head of toxicology at Valencia's University Hospital.
At Proyecto Hombre, a non-governmental organization that provides drug counselling, up to 80 per cent of patients are addicted to cocaine. About 20 years ago it was barely 1 per cent.
There is some good news. The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), an independent group within the United Nations, noted the first drop in cocaine use among Spanish school children since 1994. The percentage of the age 14-18 group who said they had used cocaine dropped from 7.2 per cent in 2004 to 4.1 per cent in 2007.
But the INCB said that cocaine use was on the increase in Britain, Italy, Germany and France.
Earlier this year, the Spanish government passed the National Strategy on Drugs 2009-2016 to stress prevention and the greater involvement of society as a whole.
But the bloody violence of the drug trade has still spilled over into Spain. In January, Colombian hit men stormed a Madrid hospital to assassinate Leonidas Vargas, one of Colombia's most powerful cocaine lords who had been hospitalized for lung and heart problems.
A few days later, Vargas' brother and his girlfriend were shot dead in Colombia.
