Doñana National Park

In 1262 King Alfonso X of Castile set up a royal hunting preserve in the Las Rocinas forest between the Tinto and Guadalquivir rivers. Later the 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia, commander of the Spanish Armada, bought back part of the land, and the country retreat where his wife Ana de Silva y Mendoza went to live, the Coto de Doña Ana, gave Doñana its name. In 1797 the painter Francisco Goya stayed in the palace there as a guest of the ducal family.

In the 19th century British naturalists and hunters visited and wrote books that made the area known as a stopover for birds migrating to Africa. In the 1950s, when the government planned to drain the marshes for farmland and eucalyptus plantations, the landowning González-Gordon family and the ornithologists José Antonio Valverde and Francisco Bernis opposed the scheme, and it was dropped. European conservationists then ran an international appeal that raised two million Swiss francs to buy 7,000 ha of land.

In 1969 the Spanish government and the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) bought a further section of the marshes, and Doñana National Park was created by decree. It was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1994; it covers 54,252 ha, and more than 500,000 waterfowl winter there each year. In 1998 a holding dam burst at a mine at nearby Aznalcóllar, and a programme to regenerate the marshes followed.