Sustainable Spain

I just found out about the Alpujarra Sostenible pressure group and blog, which you can visit here. (It's mostly in Spanish but there is some English copy too.) The organisation aims to protect the environment in the Alpujarra, one of the most important areas of biodiversity in Europe. Although the region remains breathtakingly beautiful to the eye of the visitor, it's clearly not beyond the threat of encroaching development. Road building in particular is unnecessarily brutal in some parts, and there's the constant threat of invernaderos (plastic greenhouses) and urbanizaciones, fortunately all at lower altitudes than Juviles. One benefit of the real estate depression could be less pressure on beautiful areas like ours for new homes - there's currently a million empty apartments in Spain.

There's no excuse for this, I know....

...but I couldn't resist. We don't have any wild lynx in the Alpujarra, there are no plans to reintroduce them here, and when the captive-bred cats from Jerez zoo are released in 2010, the nearest will be in Jaen. But I found this shot of one of this year's cubs on-line and, well, just look at him. If you had a lynx factory and a shop, you would be very rich indeed.

Urbanizacion for storks

Storks – cigüeñas in Spanish – are a common sight in Andalucia, and indeed over in Morocco. Ecija, a town in Seville province, usually has a nest on the steeple of each of its many churches, and the chimneys of many ordinary houses have one too. Storks don’t seem to like the Alpujarra, though – you always see them on the plains so I guess they don't like mountains, and we don’t get them up in Juviles, unfortunately. This shot, of a stork housing complex somewhere in Extremadura, was on the excellent http://www.iberianature.com/, but as they themselves nicked it from El País, I'm sure they won't mind my borrowing it.