The cost, say environment campaigners, will be irreparable damage to the Mediterranean's wilder southern shores where urban and industrial expansion, rampant pollution and illegal sand extraction are already taking their toll.

Morocco wants to attract millions of extra tourists to a chain of seaside resorts being built by Spanish, Belgian and Dutch consortia and US groups Kerzner and Colony Capital.

The first is under way in Saidia on Morocco's eastern edge, where Spain's Fadesa is turning a low-lying area of forests and dunes into 7 million square metres of shops, golf courses, hotels with 17,000 beds and 3,100 villas and flats.

On its British Web site, Fadesa promises "landscaped parks and green areas, as well as pleasant public spaces, (will) harmonise with the beautiful natural surroundings."

At the development last month, machines lumbered over a landscape of earthworks, workers' shacks and the tattered remains of what campaigners say was Morocco's only juniper forest.

"We call them the destroyers," said local environment campaigner Najib Bachiri. "They dug up 6 km of dunes and killed thousands of tortoises just so you can see the sea from the corniche."

In a statement, Fadesa said it had "put in place measures for the protection, recuperation and regeneration of the environment beyond what was demanded by Moroccan law".

BEACHES RETREATING

Seven out of 47 of Morocco's Mediterranean beaches have disappeared in recent years, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said in a report last year. In Algeria, of between 250 and 300 km (160 and 190 miles) of sandy beaches, 85 percent were retreating and losing sand.

In valleys throughout the Maghreb, new dams for irrigation are trapping sediment that once washed down to coastal areas to bolster important wildlife habitats.

Wildlife groups said Fadesa was given carte blanche to destroy the dunes that protected Saidia's hinterland from the sea and flatten all but a small patch of forest.

"They could at least have left some of the trees for the golf courses, but even they were uprooted," said Mohamed Benata, head of regional development association ESCO.

Fadesa has said the Saidia project will create 8,000 direct jobs and more than 40,000 indirectly in a poor region cut off since 1994 when Algeria closed its land border with Morocco.

Tourism Ministry officials said they wanted each new resort to make use of the local environment to attract higher-spending visitors, adding that they had enforced the most widely used international standards for preserving the natural habitat.

Some observers say Morocco made a mistake in allowing Fadesa to build close to the Moulouya wetland, the country's most important reserve for more than 200 species of birds, and fear the worst, given plans for up to a million visitors every year.

"It's too close to the mouth of the river which has the richest ecosystem," said Alaoui El Kebir of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Rabat.

Saidia's unique habitat drew life from water seeping through the sand and collecting in marshy areas. Fadesa has built channels and barriers to drain water away from the buildings.

"Fadesa say the work will dry about 5 percent of the wetland but our calculations show it'll be more like half," said Benata.

MIGRATING BIRDS

Without the wetland, a vital stepping stone for hundreds of millions of migrating birds would be removed.

The EEA says several north African wetlands are threatened, including Lake Bizerta in Tunisia, the salt lake of Regahaia in Algeria and 23rd of July Lake in Libya.