Cleanup crews work to remove oil along the shore after an oil spill in the Ventanilla Sea in Callao province stained beaches in the district of Lima, Peru, January 20, 2022. Photo: AFP

At Miramar Beach, in the famous resort of Ancon in Peru, there are no bathers despite the summer heat. Instead, it’s full of workers in coveralls cleaning up an oil spill.

Nearly a million liters (264,000 gallons) of crude spilled into the sea last weekend when a tanker was hit by waves while unloading at the La Pampilla refinery in Ventanilla, 30 kilometers away north of Lima.

Its owner, the Spanish oil company Repsol, attributed the accident to the swell caused by the volcanic eruption in Tonga, thousands of kilometers away.

“The oil reaches the beach at high tide at night (…) and settles on the shore,” Martin Martinez of the NGO AMAAC Peru, who is overseeing the cleanup, told AFP.

“We take the opportunity to remove it from the sea, that and the saturated sand,” he says.

The spill has dealt a blow to tourism in the popular resort and the businesses that make the most money during the summer season.

“There were a lot of people until Sunday. The stain arrived on Monday, and since then no one has been swimming,” said Richard Gutierrez, 48, who runs a food and soda stand on Miramar beach.

“We can’t sell anything, there are no holidaymakers, there is no one” apart from a hundred cleaners – military, hired repsol and volunteers – who shovel out the polluted sand for the transport to a toxic waste treatment facility.

The Peruvian government called the spill of some 6,000 barrels of oil an “ecological disaster” and demanded compensation from Repsol.

The company denies responsibility, saying maritime authorities issued no warnings of abnormal waves after the Tonga eruption.

The task, which began on Tuesday, is arduous.

Workers deposit the polluted sand on blue tarps, which are dragged to a pile further inland, waiting to be transported to another site.