Cabañeros

Declared in 1995, Cabañeros owes its excellent state of preservation, paradoxically, to its isolation and to the meagre economic returns of its large estates, which stopped any agricultural or building development in its tracks. The Ministry of Defence's plan, announced in 1982, to turn it into a firing and manoeuvre range set off a well-known public and environmental protest in the 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.