Rewilding Spain's Iberian Highlands
The introduction of tauros cattle in the Iberian Highlands, which straddle Castile-La Mancha and Aragon, is boosting biodiversity and creating opportunities for spectacular wildlife safaris
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Words by Jessica Vincent
(La Maleza Park)
The snow had started to fall when three enormous bulls charged toward us. I heard them before I saw them: heavy, short breaths and the thunder of hooves clattering on rock, trembling the mud beneath my boots like an earthquake. The biggest horns I’d ever seen, curving sideways and up to the sky like the handlebars of a Harley Davidson, were almost upon us. And there was nothing but open steppe between me and a creature big enough to flip a car.
It was a cold winter weekend when I travelled into the Sierra de Albarracín range in Teruel province to see Spain’s first herd of semi-wild tauros. Specially bred to be released into Europe’s wild forests to improve biodiversity, they’re now genetically the closest living animals to the extinct aurochs, the ancient wild cattle from which all domesticated breeds are descended.
(La Maleza Park)
“The aurochs was our continent’s defining animal,” reads the foreword to The Aurochs: Born to be Wild, published by Rewilding Europe and the Taurus Foundation, two Dutch NGOs working to introduce tauros and other species to Europe’s wild landscapes.
“Not only was it a keystone species … but it also became crucially important to the history of mankind.” The aurochs has been extinct since 1627 when the last individual, a female, was killed in what’s now Poland.
In previous centuries, large numbers of this huge herbivore – bulls weighed up to a tonne – roamed freely in regions across the Old World, from Britain and southern Scandinavia to North Africa and Central Asia. But it was in Europe that aurochs had a particularly profound impact. For millennia, the aurochs was the largest mammal on the continent, after the woolly rhino and mammoth went extinct during the last Ice Age. It drew the ploughs of the ancient Minoans, and provided ancient Greeks with milk and hides. More importantly, these large herbivores – along with European bison, wild horses, deer and ibex – were vital for healthy ecosystems.
“Aurochs were the architects of the European landscape,” explained Pablo Schapira, biologist and team leader at Rewilding Spain, the local NGO partner of Rewilding Europe. “Aurochs fertilised the soil with their dung, removed excess biomass in the forests and created open spaces for other plants and animals to thrive.”
La Maleza Park
As aurochs declined over the centuries, large numbers of domesticated cattle grazed enough forest to maintain a thriving landscape. In recent years, though, a decline in livestock farming and increasing land abandonment across Europe has allowed forests and shrubs to grow unchecked, Schapira explained, increasing the risk of wildfires and reducing the overall biodiversity of European forests.
“We have a misconception of what a healthy forest should look like,” observed Schapira. “In Spain, we have a real problem with wildfires. This is because there is too much biomass in the forests and less open grassland to slow the spread.” Nearly four centuries after the aurochs’ extinction, Rewilding Europe and the Taurus Foundation are working to introduce tauros to European forests.
Referred to as ‘aurochs 2.0’, the tauro is the result of cross-breeding several types of European bovines – including the Spanish breeds Limia, Sayaguesa and Pajuna del Sur – to create a cow that looks, eats and behaves like the ancient aurochs. To date, some 500 tauros have been born, and the Tauros Programme has released herds in Portugal, Croatia, the Czechia, Romania, the Netherlands and, most recently, in the Iberian Highlands of central Spain.
Photo by Juan Carlos Muñoz
Photo by Juan Carlos Muñoz
Gentle giants
The three young tauros hurtling towards us pulled up just 100m away – but our safari guide, Ricardo Almazán, didn’t even flinch. “They won’t hurt us,” he smiled, as a thunderous, high-pitched ‘Moooooo!’ rent the air. One tauro raised his head to the sky like a wolf, nostrils flared and tongue hanging lopsided from his mouth. “They’re gentle animals – towards humans, at least.”
Suddenly, two of the bulls turned to face one another, butting heads with a bone-cracking crunch, hind legs kicking at the earth. Grunting, they waltzed from side to side with horns interlocked, thick breath rising from their nostrils, tails swaying. Yet though the fight looked fierce, they soon broke apart and continued as if nothing had happened.
Safari Rewilding La Maleza, a wildlife tour introducing visitors to Spain’s first herd of semi-wild tauros, is Ricardo’s brainchild. As well as being sustainability advisor to the local municipal government, he’s the director of Parque de Fauna La Maleza, a sanctuary for rescued Iberian animals including wolves, ibex and, soon, lynx.
Photo by Lidia Valverde
When Rewilding Spain contacted Ricardo about bringing the first herd of tauros to the area, he agreed to run the project alongside La Maleza, funding much of the initial costs – more than €50,000 – himself. The safaris, launched in summer 2023 with a loan from the Rewilding Europe Capital fund, help repay some of those costs and bring much-needed tourism to the area. Most importantly, though, they enable people to see the benefits of rewilding first-hand.
“Spain has an urgent need to change its attitudes towards wildlife,” said Ricardo, a former restaurateur and hotel owner who, before opening La Maleza and reading extensively on the subject, knew little about running a rewilding project. “It’s all well and good releasing animals into the wild, but we need people to stop seeing them as a threat. If we’re ever going to succeed in rewilding Europe, we need people to want to live alongside these animals.”
Our journey had begun an hour earlier, boarding an open-topped Land Rover Santana to climb steep off-road trails flanked by dense pine forest, its trees planted in orderly, clearly artificial rows. “When you look at these pine forests, you see green,” said Ricardo pointing at the trees. “But what you’re actually seeing is a desert. Look at the forest floor: what do you see? Nothing. When one species dominates, nothing else can grow.” I followed his gaze. He was right: beneath the canopy lay nothing but brown earth and desiccated pine needles. As we drove deeper into the forest, I watched keenly for a deer or a wild goat – this was, after all, a wildlife safari. But I saw nothing – not even a bird.
Bringing back life
As we approached tauro territory, though, everything changed. The pines thinned out, allowing the mountainside to be flooded with natural light. Instead of uniform forest, I spied young, leafy trees and rocky mounds sprouting with rosemary, thyme and dozens of flowering plants and shrubs I couldn’t name. Within minutes of our arrival in this wilder area, a fallow deer bolted across the landscape.
Moments later, a wild boar waddled idly across our path, his snout wrinkling as he sniffed the air. My eyes were caught by a flash of yellow, white and black as overhead an Egyptian vulture circled. “This is what the Iberian Highlands would’ve looked like thousands of years ago,” said Ricardo. “There are maybe 40 or 50 plant species just in this area. At sunset, it’s just incredible – you wouldn’t believe how much wildlife there is.”
Straddling the regions of Castile-La Mancha and Aragon, the Iberian Highlands rewilding project landscape encompasses 850,000 hectares of pine and juniper forest, wide steppes and deep river canyons. Mass land abandonment since the 1960s has led to a population of fewer than two people per square kilometre here – the area is often referred to as “empty Spain” – and the return of deer, wild boar, mouflon and vultures. Over half of the area was already protected within Natura 2000 sites but, in 2022, the Iberian Highlands became part of Rewilding Europe’s initiative to turn the continent’s least populated areas into natural wildlife sanctuaries.
The tauro territory currently spans 1,000 hectares. It’s a relatively small space for such large, free-roaming animals, Ricardo told me, but big enough to make finding them tricky, especially in bad weather. On the day I visited, Ricardo used a satellite tracker, and Paco, a local employed by Rewilding Spain to care for the herd, helped locate them in the incoming snowstorm. As tauros gathered, we stepped out of the car and walked deeper into the forest, watching as the cattle browsed twigs and stripped bark like butter curls from young pine trees. “They’re the only animals that do that,” said Ricardo, admiringly. “Tauros eat what other wild and domesticated animals won’t touch.
Ricardo Almazán teaching visitors about La Maleza Park’s wildlife (Photo by Lidia Valverde)
Among the feeding tauros, Ricardo showed me a large hole in the bark of an enormous pine: a protected nesting site for the rare and vulnerable greater noctule bat, the largest and least studied in Europe. Alongside a river we spotted webbed toeprints and musty, jasmine-scented droppings – signs of an otter, not seen in the area for decades. Ricardo is confident that these species are returning here as a direct result of the introduction of the tauros. “This isn’t just about releasing a load of cows into the mountains,” said Ricardo. “The tauros are making these forests liveable again for other species – they’re bringing them back life.”
In a small clearing in the woods, just past the sleek black Pottoka ponies, I saw swathes of pine forest covering the mountainside, and a sadness washed over me as I thought of all of the species unable to thrive in the darkness of that dense monoculture. But then a large black tauro strode past me, and the flash of light brown fur running down his spine – a trait passed down from ancient aurochs – reminded me that there is hope. Because of people such as Ricardo and NGOs including Rewilding Spain, one day the Iberian Highlands – and, perhaps, the whole of the European continent – could not only be inhabited by ancestors of the extinct aurochs, but also by thousands of other wild species, big and small.
Biologists and rewilding experts have highlighted the benefits of returning our planet to its wilder state yet, for most of us, such dramatic change – and personal sacrifice – can be hard to imagine, let alone believe in. As we headed back to the car, I asked Ricardo what motivated him to invest his life savings into rewilding his homeland. “Madness,” he laughed, unlatching the back of the Land Rover for me. The snow started to fall again, and it was time to head back down the mountain. “This is a life of constant work and expense. But if I left it to the government, it wouldn’t happen. Change starts with us.
Need to know
Safaris Rewilding La Maleza tours depart from Parque de Fauna La Maleza, 15km from the town of Albarracín, every Saturday, Sunday and bank holidays between March and October around sunset, either at 5pm or 6pm depending on the time of year. In summer months (late July to early September), there are daily safaris at 9am and 7pm. Trips last around two hours and must be booked in advance via the park website. The safari vehicle carries a maximum of eight people.
Further information
Rewilding Spain (affiliated with the continent-wide Rewilding Europe organisation) has a range of projects in the country.
Photo by Lidia Valverde
Glossary
Sustainability
The quality of being able to continue over a period of time, or the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance (Camrbdige Dictionary).
