Coto de Doñana

For both birdwatchers and non-birders visiting the province or indeed to the south-west of Spain, and even at the height of summer when the marisma is dry and migratory birds are absent, Doñana is a must-see, but plan ahead - it is only possible to see the actual national park on a pre-arranged, 74-kilometre, 4-hour guided tour, with a maximum of 258 places a day. It leaves from the El Acebuche Visitor Centre in sight-seeing minibuses with enormous windows and a guide-cum-driver who explains the area and points out the birds and animals. But if this is not possible or leaves you hungry for more, the surrounding Doñana Natural Park, though evidently of slightly less ecological worth, is open to the public and a number of inidividuals and companies offer guided birdwatching and other visits (almost all of which will be quite satisfactory, perfectly legit and, if this is your bag, provide a great birding experience - just don't be taken in if you are told you are going to be escorted around Doñana itself). And access on foot or bicycle to Doñana's fabulous beach is unrestricted: the resort town of Matalascañas is the entrance to it.

The Coto de Doñana National Park is not just one but a whole series of valuable ecosystems with the famous marisma, marsh or swamp, at its heart. Its biotopes (for those who have not studied biology: bi·o·tope (b-tp) n. An area that is uniform in environmental conditions and in its distribution of animal and plant life) listed on Fundación Doñana 21's website are: arboreal, scrubland, steppe, coast, riverside, lacustrine (that means aquatic but shallow, as at the edge of a lake) and swamp.

The visit to Doñana begins with the convoy of 4-wheel drive minibuses leaving the El Acebuche Visitors' Centre and driving down onto and along the beach at Matalascañas, where it will enter the first ecosystem in the park, the immense white dunes, kilometres of them, more like a desert than a beach, which effectively cut Doñana's interior off from the sea (fishermen used to get their drinking water in the dunes by simply digging down a few centimetres). A couple of hundred yards in, the minibuses will stop as they do in each ecosystem. In the dunes, the guides will point out the corrales, valleys left by the shifting dunes exposing moist sand on which plants and other life can survive until the dunes cover the corral up again.

The corrales give way to the cotos, preserves, stabilized sand on which different kinds of scrub and woodland grow - thick undergrowth is a characteristic and snakes and reptiles are common. The locals traditionally graze their cattle (which remind me of Highland cattle) and horses here, indeed leave them to their own devices for months at a time. The undergrowth makes spotting wild animals difficult, but birdlife is plentiful. The convoy crosses the track followed by the annual drunken pilgrimage which leaves a swathe of destruction across the park on its way to its crazed, ecstatic climax in the picturesque village of El Rocio: SPV readers will want nothing to do with it.

The last ecosystem before the marisma is the vera, verge, some hundreds of yards wide and which specialists define as "the border between sand and clay," the clay of the marisma and the sand from the dunes to the cotos. The trees are taller in the vera and the undergrowth changes to grass - don't expect to see Doñana's most valuable fauna, the Spanish imperial eagle or the Iberian lynx, simply because they are so rare, but you will see other species of eagle and other birds of prey, fallow and red deer and probably wild boar, sometimes almost rubbing shoulders with the farm animals.

The marisma is Doñana's largest and most famous ecosystem. Essentially, it is a huge, flat riverbed without a river, half-filled with water by rainfall in the winter and properly filled when the Guadiana, swollen by the melting snows of the Sierra Morena, overflows its banks in the spring. The marisma is at its most spectacular then, flocked by migratory birds, but is impressive even at the height of summer, when the parched, black, cracked clay of its bed extends into the haze of the horizon.

From the marisma, the tour heads back into the vera and what is called the Pinar (Pine Forest) de Marismillas, past thatched cottages which used to belong to woodsmen and their families (I think they are now used by the park authorities for maintenance purposes). The website of Turismo de Doñana says "different traditional uses of the Park are: the production of the coal, the harvest of the pineapple and of the shellfish, the beekeeping or the cultivation," which makes sense if you change coal to charcoal, pineapple to pine cone, and cultivation to growing things.

The convoy then passes the Palacio de Marismillas and emerges from the pinar on the the shore of the Guadalquivir estuary, on the other side of which you can see Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the horse races on the beach are held in the summer. Smokers will feel less guilty here on the sand (but bring something to put your butts in anyway). Finally, the minibuses head for home along the beach, round the corner of the river, past the dunes and along the thirty-odd kilometres of the Playa de Castilla, the border between the national park and the Atlantic Ocean.

Other Nature Reserves
Though eclipsed by Doñana, the Marismas del Odiel Natural Park, across the delta from the city of Huelva, is another important nature reserve and birdwatching centre, and enthusiasts may well want to take in both. In fact, the province holds a number of other nature reserves which are not sufficient in themselves to justify a visit from abroad, but which considered together should satisfy the most avid nature-lover's appetite. The Laguna del Portil Natural Park is one such: it takes something like an hour to walk all the way round and can be combined perfectly with a day of serious beachbumming. The Marismas de Isla Cristina (from where Columbus unknowingly set sail for America) is a paraje natural, protected landscape, in the west of the province towards Portugal. There is even a small nature reserve - a marshland, the Estero de Domingo Rubio - in the shadow of Huelva's nightmarish oil refinery. And Huelva's mountains include the Sierra de Aracena, guarding the western flank of the Sierra Morena (and famous for the cured ham produced there, jamón de Jabugo) and the Sierra Pelada y Rivera del Aserrador, once pyrite mining country, now in the process of being swallowed up by nature again.

More

Doñana Links
Huelva