Cabañeros

Declared in 1995, Cabañeros owes its excellent state of preservation, paradoxically, to having been designated a firing and manoeuvre range for the Spanish Air Force in 1982, which stopped any agricultural or building development in its tracks. The later attempt to turn it into a permanent bombing range set off a well-known public and environmental protest in the late 1980s that forced the government to change course and declare a national park instead, so protecting some of the finest Mediterranean woodland and scrub surviving in central Spain.