green splotches -- a military training 
zone and a swarm of natural parks -- hem in the seaside town, leaving just a 
pair of white slivers. "Those are the only areas open for development," he 
says. His finger stabs one of the white areas near the Atlantic coast. "And 
that's where they're putting the windmills -- the one place we could have 
built a hotel, a resort, something that would bring us some jobs." 
The mayor sees the windmills as a blight on the land, driving away tourists 
and crimping more lucrative projects. Local environmentalists fret that the 
installation, with its rows of steel towers and sharp metal blades, will play 
havoc with migrating birds and mar the coastline as they did in nearby 
Tarifa, a windsurfing mecca on the Strait of Gibraltar. 
Tilting at windmills is nothing new in the land of Don Quixote. But wind 
power doesn't have to be like this. At the opposite end of the country, more 
than 1,000 kilometers to the north in the green hills of Navarra, 28 steel 
windmills perch on a ridge over a landscape that resembles a nature reserve. 
Cows nap in the shade of the towers, and the narrow gravel access roads 
follow original grazing trails. Electricity is transformed in a nearby 
substation built to resemble the neighboring stone houses. The approach -- 
the result of close cooperation between business and government -- has won 
accolades from environmentalists and business leaders alike. 
Spain, the world's No. 3 producer of wind power, has become a battleground 
for two competing models of developing the business: the hodgepodge of 
unsightly wind parks seen in the south and the carefully planned and 
unobtrusive installations found up north. The conflict is intensely local, 
with the country building enough new windmills to more than triple its 
wind-power capacity by 2005. But the model that prevails will have 
consequences far beyond the Iberian Peninsula. 
Anxious to clean up its environment and limit its dependence on imports of 
natural gas, the European Union has committed its