Doñana National Park in Spain was almost destroyed by a mining disaster in 1998. Paddy Woodworth returns to find a landscape teeming with wildlife
We tend to think of natural environments as though they were some sort of packaging, the colourful but static "containers" for dynamic life in the form of plants and animals. Yet we know, of course, that this is not the case; environments are themselves living things, growing, changing, dying, and, hopefully, being reborn.
The pace of environmental change, however, is usually so slow that this is not obvious. But one of the many things that makes Spain's Doñana National Park unique is the fact that it moves and shifts almost before your eyes. This can be traumatic as well as uplifting. Five years ago, the park very nearly died - or rather, it was very nearly killed. Today, it is being triumphantly reborn. For the time being.
"The originality, greatness and beauty of Doñana is its wildness," says the park director, Alberto Ruiz de Larramendi. "It is one of the few unregulated spaces left in Europe. It is the only national park in the world with no roads - there is not one metre of tarmacadam inside its boundaries." Doñana shifts and moves so visibly because it is made, fundamentally, of sand and mud, air and water. Every moment, the Atlantic waves carry a little more sand onto its beaches, between Cadiz and the Portuguese border. Every moment, the great Guadalquivir river, flowing down from Seville, deposits a little more clay in its estuary. The wind sweeps the sand up into dunes, which advance, at about five metres per year, towards the estuarine marshes inland. When the wind is high, you can actually see this happening; this is when the local people say "the dunes are smoking".
These two ecosystems of sand and clay contend endlessly with each other, creating rich intermediate zones which are home to some of Europe's greatest hordes of migratory and nesting birds, and some of the continent's rarest wild creatures.
This is one of the last places on earth where you can find (if you are very, very fortunate) the almost-extinct Iberian Lynx. This is a graceful wild cat with elegant pointed ears and something very like a stylised oriental beard. You stand a much better chance of seeing, soaring in tight circles, the appropriately named Imperial Eagle, although it too is severely endangered. And you will have no problem finding wild boar the size of small ponies, or thousands of pink flamingoes, or, in season and after good rains, millions of flowers shimmering in the heat haze, a gorgeous mirage you can reach out and touch and smell.
The many snakes in the grass (there are eight species here) are no threat to this earthly paradise - they are part of its riches. The danger lies elsewhere. Early on the morning of April 25th, 1998, seven million tons of sludge, laced with zinc, copper, lead and arsenic, oozed through a collapsed wall in a mining reservoir upstream from the park. Preceded by millions of cubic metres of acidic water, a slow-motion tidal wave of poison advanced down the Guadiamar river, a tributary of the Guadalquivir, which flows alongside the national park boundary.
This was an environmentalist's classic nightmare: a huge quantity of toxic waste bearing down on one of the continent's flagship protected environments. Good news and bad news followed, in almost equal measure. Extraordinarily rapid action by park engineers shut off the waters of the Guadiamar from the heart of Doñana. This is, of course, precisely the kind of "regulation" which undermines the director's vision of the park as a purely "natural" environment.
Larramendi acknowledges this ruefully, adding that the exclusion of the Guadiamar has had unexpected secondary benefits over the last five years, slowing a silting process that was beginning to choke Doñana's marshes. Perhaps the idea of a truly wild space is now an illusion, at least wherever a human population exists. In any case, this decisive move was crucial in minimising the harm done by the poisonous flood.
"The park was saved in the first week," Larramendi says confidently. But that was not evident when I first visited the Doñana for this newspaper, six months after the disaster. True, there was no obvious pollution within the national park itself. Birds and animals do not know about park boundaries, however, and many of the park's most prized species regularly feed, and even nest, outside its limits.
Thus wildlife still had access to many thousands of square metres of poisoned earth and water. There were legitimate fears that toxins would saturate the food chain in the area, causing massive mortality, infertility and mutations. Given that the park is one of the key rest-stops for birds migrating between Africa and Europe, the disaster could have seriously affected bird populations from Norway to the Gambia.
In the meantime, the mining company committed itself to a comprehensive clean-up operation. Its success would require months of drought. Ironically, this is the phenomenon which often threatens the park's wildlife most. In the background, turf wars and blame games between regional and central governments shamefully delayed damage limitation.
The weather was more helpful than the politicians, and the autumn of 1998 was remarkably dry. "The impossible has become the incredible," Hector Garrido, a member of the Biological Research Station at the park told me in October of that year. His regular bird counts showed that populations were holding up remarkable well. Five years later, he says the disaster damaged less than 1 per cent of the park's birds. None of the rare species, like the glossy ibis which had just returned to breed after an absence 55 years in 1995, has suffered significant losses. Down the food chain, among fish and amphibians, there are still worrying levels of pollution, but Larramendi believes that: "The return to normal of the invertebrate population, which suffered most, is a magnificent indication for the future." Doñana, and those who love her, seem to have had a reprieve. The efficiency of the clean-up has also enabled local farmers to recover much more quickly than expected.
But Garrido warns that a reprieve is all it is. "We've solved one small problem, but there are many more to come. We don't know what is happening under our feet." Under our feet is the aquifer, the rock formation that stores the subterranean fresh water which feeds the roots of Doñana's vegetation in the dune areas. "The future of the park depends largely on the health of the aquifer," says Larramendi. He is reasonably confident that the reservoir that caused the disaster has now been adequately dried out and sealed. But the toxic mud which was scraped off the banks of the Guadiamar has simply been dumped in another old mine upstream, and he fears that heavy metals could indeed leach down into the aquifer from this deposit.
The departure of the Swedish-Canadian mining company, Boliden - unscathed by the Spanish legal system, which never pinned down responsibility for the disaster - may make matters worse. "Where does the buck stop now for supervising these deposits? How the aquifer can be protected is a matter of real concern," the director says.
He stresses, however, that the greatest threat to the park is the human activity that goes on around and within it. "We must never forget that 2.5 million people live within a 100-kilometre radius of Doñana," he says. Water use by local farmers and, to a lesser extent, tourist developments, is depleting the aquifer. One million pilgrims visit the park area each spring to honour the Virgin of El Rocío, one of the most important religious fiestas in Spain. Many of them have a traditional right to walk through the park itself. Local cattle-ranchers also have traditional rights in the park. The pressure from visiting nature lovers can also create serious damage.
Larramendi says that the 1998 crisis has actually helped him and his colleagues confront these challenges. Agreements have been reached to limit traditional uses, and the Doñana 2005 programme, a direct response to the disaster, gives the park new rights to demand environmental quality control outside its boundaries.
"This is an opportunity. Previously our strategy was to lose the least possible each year. Now we have a chance to win a little back each year. Doñana still functions very naturally. It is still a space of liberty for nature, as far as that is still possible in Europe."