'This is going to trouble us for years to come. It means ruin'

People in the fishing hamlet of Caion gathered in the square, each leaning on his or her umbrella, studying the storm clouds that scudded overhead. Caion, 15 miles west of La Coruña, is among the worst hit of Spain's northwestern coastal villages.

Experts in every minuscule vagary of sea and wind, they reckoned the direction of the freshening breeze meant that more seaborne black filth was heading their way to compound the solidifying scum that caked the sands and rocks around us.

"If this wind keeps up, now that the ship has broken up and sunk, all that oil will be heading here. I think more has come overnight," said Ramon Lois, whose ruddy features and gnarled hands showed the effects of a lifetime at sea.

"This is going to trouble us for years to come. I have a small boat that I take out every day for spider crabs and octopus. I started doing this at 14, like my father and grandfather. It means ruin for us."

The villagers had gathered not to watch the weather but to await the arrival of Mariano Rajoy, Spain's Deputy Prime Minister, making the first official trip to the region since the ageing oil tanker foundered. The ministerial helicopter swept across the cove and settled on the harbourside, whose stone walls were draped by a treacly tidemark.

"I hope he's come to help, not just to make empty promises," said an elderly woman leaning from her window as the official party strode up the hill to the main square.

Minutes earlier, a cheery busload of young soldiers, clad in olive-green shower capes and boots, scrambled down to the shore and started shovelling up wedges of sludge and sand into rubber buckets that were then passed hand over hand to a container truck. They looked as though they were excavating a half-made road. But not even their shovels and their energy could clear the inlets clogged with black mud.

Waiting to greet Mr Rajoy was Evaristo Lareo, head of Caion's 80 fishermen and representative of families hit by the disaster. "Most people here live off the sea, they go off in their little boats every day, but now they're sitting demoralised on the harbour, wondering what will happen. The coast is full of tar and there's nothing we can do," Mr Lareo said. "I went to sea at 16, and I'm 53. You can see most people are middle aged or elderly. Our children don't want this life."

Mr Rajoy passed amid the shy groups, stepped gingerly on a cleaned-up portion of beach then disappeared with Mr Lareo and a crowd of journalists into the small fisherman's headquarters overlooking the tiny port.

Those left outside included Manuel Felipez, a fisherman grounded like all the others by an indefinite fishing ban along the northern coast. Did he think Mr Rajoy would help them? He shrugged long and deep in the manner of these marine folk, studied the watery horizon and said: "We'll have to wait and see."

How long had he been fishing? Thinking, perhaps, that I don't understand his Galego dialect, he holds out his hand, about knee-high. Then he turned his fierce grey eyes upon me. "From here [he points to his mouth] politicians produce a lot. But from here [rubbing his thumb and finger together to indicate money] nothing," and he averts his gaze once more.

Fishermen have been promised €30 (£19) for each day they cannot fish, poor compensation for catastrophic losses they face as the peak Christmas season approaches when they make most of their annual income. While Britons look forward to turkey, and poultry farmers make their big profits at Christmas, Spaniards celebrate the festive season with heaped plates of shellfish. Prices soar and the fishermen make enough to keep them going through lean months. Ramon Lois is a percebeiro, a collector of percebes, or goose barnacles, the most prized and expensive of all shellfish because of the perilous difficulty in collecting them.

Mr Lois risks his life by clambering on the jagged outcrops to pluck the tenacious percebes from the rock, choosing the moment between the crashing waves when the semi-submerged creatures are briefly exposed. "I don't know any other kind of work," he says.

Mari Carmen, whose husband has his own fishing boat, said the tragedy reminded her of when the oil tanker Aegean Sea was wrecked off La Coruña more than 10 years ago. "We're still waiting for compensation for the losses we suffered then," she said. "The authorities have only just agreed and we're still waiting to be paid. It's one blow after another. We are poor here, dependent on a dangerous, vulnerable industry, and each tragedy seems blacker than the last."

As Mr Rajoy flew out, the storm clouds blackened and umbrellas opened.

Black, black, black ... In Caion they repeat the words, to describe their blighted coves and rockpools, their poisoned shellfish, their future.