Meanwhile some other tourist economies are seriously under threat down on some of the lovely beaches of the Caribbean, where unusually large amounts of dirty-brown sargassum seaweed has been washing up this summer and decomposing in the sun, along with the dead fish and turtles caught up in it.

In Antigua the pile of the stuff grew to more than 4 feet high, and in Mexico a team of 5,000 labourers has been employed to rake the sargassum from 100 miles of beach in Quintana Roo, carting away more than 1,000 lorry-loads from one stretch. The Mexican beaches at Cancun and Tulum have been hit, as have those in Barbados and Belize, and a natural disaster has been declared in Tobago.