The Arenal beach in L’Hospitalet de l’Infant (Tarragona) was closed on Monday afternoon for three hours after two sharks were sighted close to the shoreline, local police sources have reported.
The sighting was at twelve noon, when a lifeguard and a number of bathers saw two sharks near the beach. They immediately notified the emergency services and the red flag was raised.
The sharks, according to these sources, would be of the great blue species, common in these waters and measuring about three meters long.
The beach, which according to the police was full of bathers at that time, was closed and people who were in the water were instructed to return to land.
Once the animals moved away from the beach, the Arenal was reopened for bathing.
The blue shark (Prionace glauca), together with the bluntnose sixgill shark (Hexanchus griseus) is, the only medium-sized shark which is still relatively abundant in the Costa Brava with numbers generally increasing in the warm months of the year (from May to October), when the water column is stratified.
