If Abel Chapman raised his head...

Jerez de la Frontera, early years of the 20th century. Two men, Abel Chapman and Walter J. Buck, friends, naturalists and lovers of ornithology almost in equal measure, are preparing to go out one morning in early May to a place located near the great mouth of the Guadalquivir River to enjoy a pleasant day in the field. That day, none of them could imagine that their trips to Doñana would last for almost 40 years.

It's not hard for British people to recognize this: they feel a deep and irresistible attraction to Spain. For various reasons or interests, from the Duke of Wellington to Hugh Thomas, to Gerald Brenan, Ian Gibson or Raymond Karr, the English found their destiny in our country Grand Tour, an initiatory trip around the world that every good gentleman should take in his youth in order to complete his education, seeking a romantic and exotic life experience in which Iberia stood as a wild world that had no pejorative meaning for them, but quite the opposite: a free, untamed, untamed country...

It was this British Hispanism that brought Abel Chapman to Jerez de la Frontera in 1880, when he had just turned 32, attracted at first by the city's excellent wine production, a hobby that allowed him to meet Buck soon after arriving, and with whom he would begin a friendship that would unite them forever.

Both would cultivate for decades their taste for travel, exploration of rural and natural environments, their passion for wildlife and, especially, ornithology. His mythical works Wild Spain (1893) and Unexplored Spain (1910) will be wonderful books as chronicles of his expeditions through our bull's skin. They were the first to study Doñana, to value its landscape and to admire the landscape of the human settlements in Marsh with a dedication, enthusiasm and tenacity hitherto unknown, and which are still indispensable references for the historical knowledge of Iberian nature.

The years in which Chapman and his inseparable Buck were scrutinizing Doñana, the great marsh was a kind of unfathomable universe, a liquid and swampy land as far as the eyes of the human being could see, with endless meadows of castanets, reeds, eneas and reeds. The vision of sunrises among green immensity, the roar of flamingos landing like a pink watercolor that blurred the sky, geese among the bellies or the symphonies of the herons at dusk, made Chapman write in his diary that Doñana was”The closest thing to paradise on this planet called Earth”. It was a fabulous kingdom built of water and clay, mud and sand, floodplains and verdants strewn with centuries-old cork oaks in whose cups the imperial eagle nestled, lynxes thrived in the thick undergrowth and deer roamed their zeal after the first rains of autumn.

Today, 140 years later, Doñana is dying and its largest permanent lagoon, Santa Olalla, is drying up for the second consecutive year, an unprecedented fact that shows the deterioration of the wetland caused by climate change, but mainly by human overexploitation. In January 2022, the CSIC Biological Station estimated that 80% fewer specimens of wintering waterbirds are found in the marshes, which is the lowest number in the last 40 years, and a WWF study estimates that between 7 and 9 cubic hectometres of water per year are depleted from the park's aquifer for illegal red fruit crops. The poor management of the most fascinating wetland in southern Europe, a World Heritage Site since 1994, has caused Doñana to be expelled for the first time from the IUCN Green List of natural areas because it “does not meet the standard” for conservation as a result of the policies of the Junta de Andalucía.

If Abel Chapman raised his head...

We can still and, above all, must save Doñana, its great marsh, forests and interior lagoons, its dunes and pikes, its pipes and walls; an earthly paradise whose habitats, not long ago, our partner from Environmental Ideas Jorge G. Cuevas, led visitors to fill their retinas with beautiful prints and their eardrums with the sounds of hundreds of birds' songs. A place on Earth that suffers every day from that difficult balance between conservation of the natural environment and human interests, a damaged orchard, but still alive and pregnant with pulsating wildlife that represents the grandeur of nature, but also its fragility and subtlety. Preserving it will undoubtedly be a beautiful hymn to the fullness of free, wild and brave life and a commitment as an advanced and mature society that cares for and preserves our environmental and cultural heritage. With no time to waste, all of us, LET'S SAVE DOÑANA!

Chema Fernández, Biodiversity