How Europe’s most iconic wetland could be finished off by a strawberry farming bill

Doñana is one of the largest wetlands in Europe, and one of its most iconic protected areas. A World Heritage and Ramsar site, it hosts up to half a million migratory waterbirds annually, around 50 resident waterbird species, a rich biodiversity, and highly endangered species such as the Iberian imperial eagle and the Iberian lynx. But it has been degrading for decades — and a recent farming bill legalising informal land occupation for intensive irrigated strawberry production in its immediate neighbourhood is risking to devastate it completely.

The conflictive process that led to Doñana’s legal protection in the 60s left a lasting legacy on its fate as a conservation area. Only one-third of the original marshland and a fraction of its forests, streams and ponds were covered by the protected status. The rest were turned into polders, rice fields, irrigated agriculture, and exotic tree plantations1. These changes resulted in a polarised landscape of extremes: anthropogenic versus pristine2. Despite its growing international reputation as a conservation area, its surroundings have been subjected to rapid land- and water-use intensification for agriculture and tourism1, leading to profound shortage and pollution of surface water, groundwater overexploitation, overgrazing, and recurrent forest fires. Shifting baselines generated perceptual biases hampering the identification of the ensuing ecological degradation. Multi-million investments in ‘sustainable development’ programs largely failed because they also promoted the continued expansion of infrastructures for tourism and intensive, greenhouse-based agriculture that now threaten Doñana3.