Doñana National Park

Its history goes back to the 13th century, when Alfonso X the Wise made it a royal hunting ground; the present name comes from Doña Ana de Silva y Mendoza, wife of the 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia, who retired to live on the estate in the 16th century. Under Franco much of the surrounding marshland was drained for farming, and only the decisive intervention of the ornithologist José Antonio Valverde and the newly founded WWF — which in 1963, after an international campaign backed by Julian Huxley and Guy Mountfort, ran one of the first fundraising drives in the history of conservation — made it possible to buy and save the central core, declared a national park in 1969. It now protects the greatest concentration of migratory birds in western Europe and the last wild populations of the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle, though it faces a serious water crisis as the aquifers around its farmland are overdrawn.