Los Alcornocales

Los Alcornocales Natural Park was declared on 28 July 1989 and protects 167,767 hectares at the western end of the Baetic Range, spread across seventeen municipalities in the province of Cádiz and one in Málaga. It forms a south-to-north strip running from the coast at Tarifa, on the Strait of Gibraltar itself, to the inland ranges, and borders the Sierra de Grazalema to the north and the Strait Natural Park to the south. It holds the largest preserved and productive stand of cork oak woodland on the Iberian peninsula and one of the most important in the world, worked continuously for cork.

The relief is one of sandstone and slate ranges with sharp slopes and summits around 1,000 m; the highest is El Aljibe, at 1,092 m. Its most singular feature is the canutos: narrow, deep, north-facing valleys where the moisture arriving from the sea gathers and forms genuine cloud forests. In them survives a subtropical laurel forest unique in continental Europe, with bay laurel, rhododendron, the shrub known in Spanish as avellanillo, laurustinus and alder, accompanied by holly and numerous fern species that are extremely rare at these latitudes. It is relict vegetation: this kind of forest covered much of central and southern Europe during the Tertiary and here escaped the glaciations. In some canutos even Psilotum nudum grows, one of the most primitive types of vascular plant in existence, whose other populations are thousands of kilometres away, in subtropical parts of the planet.

Water is the determining factor behind all that richness: the Barbate, Guadalete, Guadiaro, Guadarranque, Palmones and Jara rivers run through the park, and there is a dense network of streams, aquifers and reservoirs. The wildlife includes a notable amphibian community in the streams, carnivores such as the Egyptian mongoose, the badger, the otter, the genet and the wildcat, and the roe deer, known in Spanish as corzo morisco, as its characteristic ungulate. Its position beside the Strait also makes it a key point on the migration route of raptors and other soaring birds between Europe and Africa.