Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, (Poza de la Sal, March 14, 1928), the great Spanish naturalist and broadcaster, died 30 years ago today. He was killed in a helicopter accident while filming in Alaska on his birthday March 14, 1980.
He was an expert in falconry and animal behavior and spent many years studying wolves, but above all he was a great communicator who captivated Spain in the 1970’s, doing more than anybody to promote natural history among the general public. He is best known for the highly successful and influential series El Hombre y la Tierra (1975–1980), which you can watch online here. Millions of homes in Spain were captivated by the series, and there are possibly apocryphal tales of the streets being empty when the episodes were broadcast. The series and his other work played no small part in the change in attitude towards wildlife in general and wolves in particular. Rodríquez de la Fuente used wolves he had raised himself from cubs living in a semi-wild fenced estate for the film. They were different times with inferior cameras than today. But, for all its trickery, the episode on el lobo still stand out as superb and beautiful piece of nature documentary and holds a rightful place in contemporary Spanish folk memory. And his work inspired a whole generation of young Spanish naturalists who work in nature conservation today.
I came across this rather harrowing photo in a book review of Historie de l’ours dans les Pyrénées in El Pireneo Digital. It was taken in 1928 after a hunt in Urdós, Valle de Aspe across the border in France. In 1935, some 200 bears still survived in the Pyrenees and Pre-Pyrenees. The last bear steak was offered in restaurant in French Pyrenees in 1960. A ban on hunting came in Spain in 1967 and in France several years later. Today, with just 20 odd animals in the entire Pyrenees – most of which were brought from the Balkans, further reintroduction is the only way of re-creating a viable population of bears in the range.
Interesting documentary narrating the tragic events of 9th January 1949 when a dam upstream of Lake Sanabria, the largest in lake in Spain, burst. A wall of water swept down the Tera Valley and engulfed the village of Ribadelago. Around 100 people were killed. The Francoist authorities covered up the report on the defective construction of the dam.
More on Sanabria including contemporary news report by Time Magazine (iberianature) “One night last week all was quiet in Ribadelago. In the tavern men were playing cards. At the church Father Plácido Esteban-Gonzalez had just arrived on his motor scooter from the provincial capital of Zamora. An electrician named Rey was working late in his shop. Shortly after midnight the lights in the village flickered out. At the tavern, irritated cardplayers lit candles, went on with their game. Suddenly, a distant, muffled roar was heard..Read
The symbol of Madrid represented by the bear and the strawberry tree is well known, but here’s a much earlier image showing Iberian bears liking for these arbutus cherries. The bear forms part of a C4th AD mosaic found at Villa Fortunatus in Fraga, Zaragoza, and is part of an agricultural calendar, representing the month of November. It can be seen at the Museo Provincial de Zaragoza. Sadly today, bears in Spain no longer gorge on these fruits in autumn to the extent as they did as they are largely absent from the range of the strawberry tree.
Surfing the Net I came across the tiny Pheasant Island, one the world’s four remaining condominiums. The island is on the River Bidassoa and is under the joint sovereignty of France and Spain, and administered by Irun (in Spain) and Hendaye (in France) for alternating periods of six months. It covers 2,000 m2 and is known as Isla de los Faisanes in Spanish, Île des Faisans, Île de l’hôpital or Île de la Conférence in French and Konpantzia in Basque.
The Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed here in 1659 putting an end the Thirty Years’ War, as shown in the painting below, and the site has been used for numerous exchanges of captives and princesses to be wed.
An interesting piece of trivia for geographical nerds like myself. The rest of you may struggle to find any interest.
Spanish Wood Pasture: Origin and Durability of an Historical Wooded Landscape in Mediterranean Europe
Spanish dehesas, the most extensive wood pastures in Mediterranean Europe, are a vivid example for demonstrating that the impact of rural communities on forests has not always been a bad thing. Environmental history is vital for understanding this cultural landscape. This article first analyses the origin of the dehesa. The border logic and the medieval Reconquest are elements that undoubtedly played a decisive part in its genesis; but, for the significance of Roman influence in Spain, it is necessary to consider the question of the possible existence of dehesas in Antiquity. The second aspect concerns the spreading of this landscape from the Middle Ages onwards. Dehesas are usually linked to the large properties owned by military orders, but most of all the spreading of the dehesa was favoured by the rise of transhumance from the thirteenth century onwards. Finally, the article emphasises that the durability of the Spanish wood pasture can be explained by a combination of several factors: insecurity along the border, the fact that transhumance was the most important industry in Spain for many centuries, and the protective laws adopted by the rural communities in order to protect their dehesas. Vincent Clément See also dehesa
The “aurora borealis” is a luminescent meteor, a phenomenon that frequently happens in areas close to the North Pole and which can also be seen in rather exceptional circumstances in regions of Central Europe. So the aurora borealis that could quite clearly be seen from the Pyrenees, and even from the top of the Tibidabo hill in Barcelona, on the 25th of January 1938, was an absolutely unusual occurrence. It was in fact a unique experience. There are no known accounts of any other event of that kind at such meridional latitudes. Furthermore, the phenomenon took place in the midst of war, thus causing terrible confusion and shock among the soldiers who were fighting on the Aragonese front.
I came across this remarkable set of aerial photos of Catalonia. Above the Delta del Llobregat, now a sad vestige of its former glory. Continue reading … Read the rest of this entry
From the BBC yesterday and picked up from the iberianatureforum here One of Western Europe’s earliest known urban societies may have sown the seeds of its own downfall
Goya was one of the first landcape painters. He had other motives than depicting pretty scapes. Here below Attack on a Coach Asalto de la diligencia (1787 and 1783 below)
From Classical connections – commentary and critique “Goya (1746-1828) undermines faith in order, showing instead the isolated forest where disorder reigns: travelers plead for their lives to murderous but indifferent bandits whose ruthlessness is more a reflection of nature than inherently cruel. The dead bodies of coachmen bleeding away to senselessness are no deterrent to further savagery. Goya does not predict the outcome of this tragedy, rather invites viewers to speculate in clinical abstraction about the amoral motives of robbers and the plight of travellers. As the first of two similar scenes of robbers attacking carriages, the other a smaller canvas (43 x 32 cm) in 1793 set in a rocky landscape and now in Madrid, the scene “present a vision of Man’s helplessness before the forces of nature or human wickedness…” Goya’s pitiful surviving travelers have no recourse surrounded only by trees who seem to not hear the screams or last prayers any more than the musket shots and curses. Goya is not glorfying such attacks, only recording the abstract threat of rampant chaos to any civilization foolish enough to think it is safe. ”
The Monasterio de San Salvador in Cornellana, Asturias was founded in 1024 by Princess Cristina, daughter of King Bermudo II of Leon, also known as Bermudo el Gotoso (Gout-stricken). The gate into the vegetable garden is decorated with the relief of what is perhaps a female bear breast-feeding a human child. The legend goes that when Cristina was a young girl she got lost in the forest and was saved by a bear which fed and protected her.
Henri Cartier-Bresson in Barcelona. Barrio Chino. 1933. He wrote “The narrow street of Barcelona’s roughest quarter is the home of prostitutes, petty thieves and dope peddlers. But I saw a fruit vendor sleeping against a wall and was struck by the surprisingly gentle and articulate drawing scrawled there”
The Ebro’s importance is reflected in the name of the Iberian Peninsula, which almost certainly comes from the river, first known as the Iber and Iberus and Ebro, and not the other way around. It was first used in the 6th century BC by a Greek author in reference to the Iberians, or the people who lived along the Iberus ( Ebro) river. Ultimately the word may well derive from the Basque words ibai (river) and ibar (valley), and these from ur meaning water. Linguists have noted similarities with the names of 200 other European rivers and streams (e.g. Ibar in Serbia, Ebrach and several Eberbach in Germany, Irwell in The UK) giving a tantalising clue as to a form of Basque being once spoken throughout Europe before the arrival of Indo-European tribes and languages. More on the Ebro
I came across this somewhat inaccurate and slightly bizarre piece of historical geography writing by one Charles Julian Bishko, University of Virginia, from “The Frontier in Medieval History” for the American Historical Association in 1955.
“The fifth sector, the Iberian, Luso-Hispanic, or Spanish and Portuguese frontier, includes between 1050 and 1250 the main southward surge of the Reconquest against the Muslims of the Taifa kingdoms and their Pyrenean valleys, to sweep beyond the Ebro at Saragossa into the Balearlics and Valencia; the Portuguese–newcomers in a frontier state created by secession from Leon, even as Kentucky from Virginia or Tennessee from North Carolina–expand from small-farming Minho and Beira to latifundial Algarve, along a coastline pointing towards America and Africa; and the Castilians, forcing their stubborn passage across the bleak plains and rocky sierras of the Iberian Meseta, occupy New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia. Of all these colonizing peoples, the Castilians chiefly confronted and most decisively solved the problems that broke the Crusader East, perhaps, and one which Walter Prescott Webb has so emphasized in his The Great Plains–namely, the adaptation of a humid-zone society, based on abundant rainfall, forest resources, deep fertile soils, and manorial farming, to the arid, treeless, barren plains of inner Iberia. Producing in abundance stalwart, rootless freemen, and colonizing kings, nobles and churchmen who, long before Cortez and Pizarro, proudly styled themselves “conquistador e poblador”, these medieval Castilian frontiersmen took early to the horse, indispensable in such terrain for travel and warfare, and unmonopolized by a closed feudal oligarchy. On the rolling Meseta they evolved a novel ranching economy, based upon large fortified rural towns that dominated a village-less countryside,–an economy in which not tracts of land but grazing rights in royal, seigneurial and ecclesiastical domain were basic. Against this background there arose not only the great sheep flocks of the (12) Mesta, so often cited by historians, but the uniquely Castilian ranching of cattle, an industry which with its long-horned stock, its free-riding, bolero-jacketed vaqueros, and its round-ups, brandings and overland drives, was destined to prolong the Spanish Middle Ages in Latin America and the plains of Texas.”
There was something strange down there in the water. I was walking the GR 5 from Sant Celoni to Montseny village, and had just spotted a grape hyacinth. There’d been violets and speedwell along the way, but this was the first real spring bloom of the year. I went up to have a look at the [...] […]
List of metropolitan areas in Spain by population. I was surprised to see Oviedo–Gijón–Avilés as high as it is. From wikipedia. Estimates are from the following sources: the “Functional Urban Areas” (FUAs) of the Study on Urban Functions of the European Spatial Planning Observation Network (ESPON, 2007)[1] the “Larger Urban Zone” (LUZs)[2] of Urb […]
Detail of modernist forge of the Staircase of the Paseo del Óvalo. The monumental staircase was built in 1921 to link the new railway station with the old part of the city. The work has modernist and neomudejar details. By SantiMB on Flickr […]
The excellent documentary Barraques pays tribute to the people who lived in the numerous shanty villages across the city for decades. One of the largest settlements spread across the hills of Carmel. Ignored by the authorities, the residents had trek every day down the hill to fetch water. Some shacks still remain, but most have [...] […]
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Hermann's tortoises for Valencia March 13, 2010 More than three hundred Hermann’s tortoises, many previously kept as pets, have been released into the Sierra de Irta (Castellón). They appear to have adapted well to the area and may already be breeding. The aim is to build up a stable population in region. Although the only original population of Hermann’s tortoises in mailand Spain is in Sierra de L’Albera (Girona), other populations in Catalonia have been reintroduced in Delta del Ebro, El Garraf and Sierra del Montsant. There is a also a population on Mallorca and Menorca. (Quercus) Via Wild Spain
Wettest winter for 51 years in Spain March 13, 2010
The rainfall records for Spain keep tumbling. According to the latest provisional figures from Aemet, this winter has the wettest in Spain for the past 51 years (since 1959), and 43% more than the average for the benchmark period of 1971-2000. Andalucía, Catalonia and Castilla-La Mancha have seen the most precipitation (rain and snow). Reservoirs are now at 72% of capacity, which is 27% more than the average for the last 10 years. And more rain is expected. Público
Weather records in Spain in January March 11, 2010 A number of weather records were smashed in Spain in January 2010. There will be more for February when they are published. More...
Laguna Negra and the Urbion Glacial Circuit Natural Park March 10, 2010
The Natural Park Laguna Negra and the Urbion Glacial Circuit is to be declared Soria’s second Natural Park. The park will cover a total of 4617 hectares of land and include two villages (Vinuesa and Duruelo de la Sierra). The area includes the glacial lake of Laguna Negra, which inspired Antonio Machado, and also includes the source of the Duero. Soria’s other Natural Park in Soria is the Canyon Rio Lobos, which was declared in 1985. More on the forum
A blog about Burgos March 10, 2010
I’ve just come across Memorias de Burgos, an excellent blog about the secret corners of the province with its abandoned villages and abbeys, oil fields and salt workings, forgotten history and stunning nature. Above photo Portillo de Canta el Gallo from the site.
It’s inspired me to add The Ayoluengo petrol field and Rioseco Abbey to the Places in Spain section.
Three lynxes die from renal disease March 8, 2010
Three Iberian lynxes of the captive breeding programme have died in recent weeks from a renal disease. Lynxes in the wild are thought not to suffer from this disease. El País
The rainfall records for Spain keep tumbling. According to the latest provisional figures 
I’ve just come across 
Three Iberian lynxes of the captive breeding programme have died in recent weeks from a renal disease. Lynxes in the wild are thought not to suffer from this disease.