When you are in a province where most of the territory of the Doñana National Park is, you have to forget for a while the visits to cathedrals and palaces and focus on the work of Mother Nature.
Doñana is a huge space full of marshlands and animal and plant life. This might not be a very technical definition, but it will not take you long to find weights of information about the thousand and one species of trees, bushes, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles that abound in this beautiful system. Among the most looked after animals are the Iberian lynx, one of the most beautiful and threatened creatures on this planet of ours that we neglect so badly sometimes.
One of the reasons that Doñana has such unique characteristics is its geographic location: it is very close to the point where two continents are separated and the Mediterranean Sea becomes the Atlantic, so thousands and thousands of birds pass through this area every year, either to visit their families or to spend a little vacation.
But a place like this could not go unnoticed to the human race, of course. Apart from the well-known Phoenicians and Romans, remains of Tartessos have also been found among the dunes of Doñana, and they have even investigated possible traces of the mythical Atlantis.
Who we are sure was in this area is Ana de Silva y Mendoza. At the end of the sixteenth century, the wife of the Duke of Medina Sidonia settled in a house in the middle of the forest, and that forest started to be known as the “Coto de Doña Ana”. For a long, long time these lands would be a kind of hunting paradise for the nobles, until well into the twentieth century, when all the ornithologists and biologists interested in the faunal wealth of the place were able to spread their conservationist intentions to many people.
So by decree, in 1969 the National Park of Doñana was born, an order that later would be extended to protect it with a lot of national and international legal categories.
If you want to take a long walk through an idyllic place where deer, fallow deer, wild boars, eagles, ducks and seagulls live, and in which, in addition, there is the curious phenomenon of mobile dunes, which is practically non-existent in the rest of Spain, you know: the magical trails of Doñana are waiting for you.
