Doñana
The Guadalquivir's vast marshes, walking dunes and lynx-haunted scrub — a ducal hunting ground that became the founding cause of European conservation.
Doñana is what the mouth of a great river does when nobody builds on it: the Guadalquivir, reaching the Atlantic west of Seville, has left a delta plain of marismas — seasonal marshes that flood into a shallow bird-covered sea in winter and bake into cracked clay by August — sealed off from the ocean by a rampart of mobile dunes that march inland a few metres a year, swallowing pine woods whole and spitting out their skeletons behind. Between marsh and dune lies the cotos, the stone-pine and rockrose scrub that is the world's principal stronghold of the Iberian lynx. Three landscapes, three faunas, and on the flyway between Europe and Africa: on a good winter day the marisma holds hundreds of thousands of wildfowl, and the year's list runs past three hundred species.
The name is a person — Doña Ana de Silva y Mendoza, whose husband the seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia (later of Armada misfortune) kept it as a hunting estate from the 1590s; kings shot here for three centuries, which is precisely why it survived intact. Its second life began in 1963, when José Antonio Valverde's campaign to stop drainage and eucalyptus schemes drew in the scientists who had just founded the WWF — buying Doñana was the new fund's first great act, and the 1969 national park followed. The place has been the bellwether of Spanish environmental politics ever since: the 1998 Aznalcóllar mine-tailings spill nearly reached the marsh, and the strawberry farms' illegal wells around Matalascañas keep the aquifer — and the park's future — on Europe's docket.
On the marsh's northern edge stands El Rocío, a village of sand streets and hitching rails that looks like an Andalusian western set until Pentecost, when a million pilgrims in ox-drawn wagons converge on its white basilica — the Romería del Rocío, older than the park and inseparable from it. The village promenade doubles as the best free birdwatching balcony in Spain: spoonbills, flamingos and glossy ibis in the shallows, and in the wet years the marsh runs to the horizon.
What's worth knowing before you go
The park core is entry-by-tour only: 4x4 buses from the El Acebuche visitor centre near Matalascañas (book ahead), the estate-run tours out of El Rocío, or the river approach on the boat from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, which lands you briefly on the far shore. The free boardwalk trails at El Acebuche, La Rocina and El Acebrón cost nothing and deliver the lagoons and cork oaks honestly. Winter and early spring are the season — full marsh, wintering geese, lynx moving in daylight; by late summer the marisma is a dry pan and the birds are gone.
The connoisseur's move is a night in El Rocío on a winter weekday, watching the marsh from the promenade at dusk when the flamingos come in — and knowing that the lynx you probably won't see crosses the road to Matalascañas most often just before dawn.