In November 2025, the Generalitat came to deploy to the UME, drones and police controls around Collserola after finding dozens of dead wild boars near Barcelona. What started with two infected animals ended up turning the city’s forests into a huge crawl area sanitary.
A city at war. For years, wild boars were a growing nuisance in Barcelona and its metropolitan area: animals that rummaged through garbage, crossed roads or appeared in housing estates next to Collserola. In 2026 the situation completely changed scale. The detection of African swine fever turned part of Catalonia into a huge health perimeter where the Generalitat began to unfold a response typical of an emergency operation.
Ground zero around Cerdanyola was surrounded by fencesclosures of wildlife passages, collective traps and access restrictions. More than 1,900 troops work on the ground while drones, canine units and specialized companies “comb” forests and peri-urban areas looking for corpses, sick animals and groups of wild boars. I was counting a few days ago The Country that the political language stopped seeming environmental to approach that of a military campaign: “empty” entire areas, “eradicate” outbreaks and contain the spread of the virus before it reaches the Catalan pork industry.
The massive hunting of thousands of animals. The magnitude of the operation explains to what extent the Generalitat considers the situation a strategic threat. The initial objective was to eliminate between 8,000 and 10,000 wild boars in the 20-kilometer radius around the outbreak detected in November 2025. The figure was later adjusted about 6,000 animals only within the critical perimeter, while the general plan aims to reduce the entire wild boar population in Catalonia by half, estimated between 120,000 and 180,000 specimens.
Since January they have already sacrificed more than 26,000 animals throughout the community. In some points of the so-called “ground zero” there would be barely twenty wild boars left after months of continuous captures. He deployment includes hundreds of traps, Pig Brig nets, thermal visors, closures of wildlife crossings and constant controls to prevent animals from crossing natural corridors around Barcelona.
Snipers, hunters and wildlife control companies. One of the most striking elements of the entire crisis is how hunters have gone from being a socially questioned figure to becoming in essential piece of the operation. Some act practically as specialized shooters in forested and peri-urban areas where drones perform poorly and animals move near inhabited areas.
Many describe night shifts with thermal visorshigh-capacity traps and rifles prepared to shoot any specimen that appears in front of the viewer. The Generalitat has even started financing fuel, veterinary assistance for capture dogs and specialized material. At the same time, the Government has hired companies accustomed to operating in urban and peri-urban environments, especially in Collserola and other spaces where wild boars have become accustomed to coexisting with the city. The result is increasingly reminiscent of a permanent campaign wildlife control deployed around a large European capital.
A gigantic economic threat. Behind this offensive there is a fear much greater than the overpopulation of wild boars itself. Catalonia concentrates an essential part of the pork industry Spanish and the expansion of African swine fever could cause a multimillion-dollar blow to exports, farms and international markets. Japan and the Philippines already restrictions have been applied and the Government fears losing health credibility if the virus escapes the controlled perimeter.
That is why the institutional discourse insists so much in “biosecurity” and the need to act extremely quickly. The Catalan administration defends that it is not an ideological or political decision, but rather a a mandatory response to avoid an economic collapse. The pressure is so high that a debate has even been opened about accelerating the marketing of game meat to absorb the tens of thousands of catches and keep the system economically viable.
The battle inside Collserola. The big problem for the authorities is that the war against wild boars is taking place in one of the environments most complex possible: a huge metropolitan area of four million inhabitants. Collserola functions as a natural refuge and motion runner for animals accustomed for years to living next to housing estates, roads and peripheral neighborhoods.
Some areas are so wooded that not even drones They allow us to accurately calculate how many copies remain. Technicians recognize that total control is extremely difficult and that is why restrictions on mobility and access to the natural environment remain in force months after the start of the crisis. Meanwhile, they continue new positives appearing week after week, fueling the feeling that the Generalitat is in a race against time to prevent the outbreak from spreading definitively beyond Barcelona.
The city-nature relationship. The crisis has also left an uncomfortable image about how the relationship between big cities and wildlife has changed. For years, Barcelona lived with a growing population of wild boars that learned to take advantage of garbage, parks and urbanized areas. The animals lost their fear of people while administrations tried to manage the problem without resorting to massive slaughter campaigns.
The african swine fever It broke that balance suddenly. Now the city lives surrounded by controls, restrictions and capture operations where police, hunters, veterinarians and wildlife specialists participate. The scene of teams searching forests with dogs, nets and rifles a few kilometers from densely populated areas has ended up projecting a strange sensation: that of a great European capital converted into the epicenter of a health war against thousands of wild animals.
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