On July 24, 2015, the Council of Ministers He approved to give him 35 million euros to the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation to buy a farm. Very few intuited it a decade ago, but on that farm was a good part of Doñana’s future.
We are about to see it come true.
A farm? What farm? The Cortijo de los Mimbral were 1,061 hectares in the Doñana forest crown. Of these, about 968 hectares They were dedicated to the cultivation of orange and the rest were “structures, warehouses, roads interior mobility and boundaries, rafts, etc.”. That 2015, the government bought 922 of them.
And he did it with the idea of Recover a water concession. That is, with the idea of reducing by 6.8 hm3 the annual water extractions of the Almonte and Las Marismas aquifer.
And it was done. With some controversy with the surroundings of the environment, the closure of the mimbrals was good news for the conservation of the park. And, eye, it is not an area of Spain in which good news abounds.
But, beyond that and in practice, the farm had been abandoned for years.
Now it’s time to see what we do with her. Because the mimbrals are, above all, an opportunity. We must not lose sight that we talk about a thousand hectares that, for years, underwent quite intensive agricultural processes that denatured their traditional state. The great question of Doñana’s technicians has always been the same,?can go back? Can we restore paradise?
That, According to Minister Aagesenit is what is going to try.
The great laboratory to recover Spain. To begin with, the General Directorate wants to renaturalize the two channels that cross the farm and seal the drainage channels. Thus, they hope to recover the lagoon and riverside habitats. To do this, they will recover native plant species (and eliminate eucalyptus, acacias or reeds); And they wait Reintroduce the rabbit which is “a fundamental element in Doñana’s trophic chain.”
They are just five million euros, but they aspire to be a key piece of a 1,400 million program for the entire park environment.
And why do you say from Spain? Because, although we usually talk about desertification because it is the most pressing problem, this is only a particular case of Ecological degradation processes of the soil that limit the capacity of the ecosystems to self -regulate.
In the mimbrals you will try something of what We have spoken in recent days: Create solid and living ecosystems where nature can develop (and repair itself) without the pressures of the human world.
If the project is successful, a very interesting path will be marked not only to recover the natural heritage, but above all for fight the worst consequences of climate change.
Image | Daniel Lobraña González