The civil war had a massive impact on people’s lives, as bitter lines were drawn between Republicans and Fascists. It was even fought within families: you could end up shooting your uncle, or your father, without realizing it. My mother lived in torment from the age of nine to about thirteen, and in the post-war period there was heavy rationing and a right-wing Catholic dictatorship to endure. Then war exploded again, this time throughout the rest of Europe. These were not ideal circumstances for any young girl or boy to grow up in.
After the civil war, she and her seven brothers and sisters worked the land, but the food was taken by the state and they had little left for themselves. My grandfather used to grow a small amount of tobacco, and he hid it in the maize fields so that the army wouldn’t confiscate it, but they always somehow found out.
It was hard for the family: they had very little food and barely any resources. Everyone had to be self-sufficient, but not in the modern, fashionable sense of the word—this was for real. It was the only way they could survive.
Franco and his supporters had a fascinating attitude toward nature. They wanted to homogenize the country and eradicate anything that threatened productivity. In previous centuries, people had felled large expanses of ancient oak forest in Asturias and other regions in northern Spain, some of the most biodiverse places in Europe. Much of this wood was used to construct the galleons that first reached the Americas and then went on to form the “invincible armada” of the Spanish navy. Franco continued logging these rich native forests, and made the problem worse by replacing native species with rows and rows of eucalyptus and pines. It was like an ethnic cleansing of nature.
As a consequence, even today, Spain catches fire every summer. The state blames it on people having barbecues or throwing cigarettes from their car. Is it their fault, though? Or is it the fault of Franco and company, who destroyed the richly diverse flora and fauna and planted highly flammable vegetation instead? There is now a movement to clear out the eucalyptus and replace them with native species, but it is hugely expensive and you have to remove every single eucalyptus stump because the trees regrow vigorously when coppiced.
Many villages, including San Esteban de Dóriga, where my mother lived, were surrounded by forests that had been there since the Iron Age. You could keep bees there, harvest berries and mushrooms, graze your cows and goats. These native forests were a useful resource to the whole community, year after year. You couldn’t “slash and burn” the whole lot, but you could cut down a tree and bring it into the village for your own use.
Franco, however, wanted to populate the whole of Spain, and put everything to practical use. Any animal that did not produce a profit was vermin and had to be destroyed. People would go out shooting in the forest, put the “unproductive” dead bears and wolves in a car trunk, then go to the town center and show them for a government fee. Records for the whole of Spain show that in 1969, 150 bears were killed. By the 1980s, when I was a kid, there were only eighty left.
These records make for sobering reading.1 From 1944 to 1961, the total number of birds, mammals, and reptiles killed in Spain was tallied at 655,010. Among them were 1,206 golden eagles, 11,105 black kites, 47,739 ravens, 2,278 choughs, 103,322 magpies, 1,961 wolves, and 10,896 snakes.
Poisoning was by far the most destructive method. Vultures suffered because people would put out meat laced with strychnine as bait for other animals, and their corpses, which the vultures fed on, would become toxic too. They forgot that vultures stopped the spread of disease (if a cow dies of contagious bovine tuberculosis, for example, vultures will pick the bones clean, preventing the disease from spreading to other animals). Perhaps people thought that God made the land and the vermin so we could kill them for entertainment.
Although Franco’s policies drastically reduced the numbers of wild animals, thankfully none resulted in mass extinction.
Yet we have not learned from our mistakes. Even today, farmers demand that the authorities keep killing wolves, even though when this is done in a random way it is detrimental to farming. Breaking up wolf packs causes even more damage to farmers, since lone wolves are more likely to attack livestock, which are easy prey. And most of the damage attributed to wolves is actually caused by wild dogs, which, in turn, are one of the wolves’ favorite prey. Funny, that.
Hearing these stories when I was young made me aware of the importance of ecosystems and how vital it is to conserve animals and plants. I became interested in politics and started to realize that the wanton destruction of nature was part of the folly of man.
Sandwiched between the Cantabrian Mountains and the sea, Asturias is one of the most rewarding places on earth—if you are into natural history. It is about thirty miles wide at one end, and about twelve at the other, and the topography is steep. Rivers tumble straight down from the mountains into the sea. You can be at 1,500 metres above sea level, looking at the rugged mountain scenery, yet only about twenty miles from the sea. Among the peaks there are waterfalls and several glacial lakes. It is one of the few places that openly display the geological history of the earth, from the day when the first molten rock solidified. In one place there are dinosaur footprints; in another, mounds of coral fossils, or fern fossils in carbon deposits.
Asturias is an unbelievable place for wildlife—the perfect place to learn about nature as a child. There are about seventy protected areas (landscapes, natural reserves, and national natural monuments), and the first national park ever declared in Spain, the Picos de Europa National Park. The jagged limestone mountains of the Picos de Europa define the eastern part of the region. They are intricate, with steep, narrow valleys and gorges, sometimes running north to south, then suddenly east to west. It is like a corrugated fingerprint of valleys, so a valley that is two and a half miles away in a straight line might be six miles away by road. What’s more, Asturias boasts the largest patch of primary deciduous forest in Europe, the last viable population of brown bears and the largest wolf population in Western Europe, not to mention the greatest densities of otters, boars, and chamois on the continent.
Near to where I spent my childhood are the River Nalón and its main tributary, the River Narcea. The Nalón drainage system flows from the mountains through pristine forest and is teeming with salmon and aquatic wildlife (sometimes I think that I am like a salmon, born in the northern Spanish rivers and migrating to England). I call the Nalón the Amazon of Asturias. Just as the Amazon has its Rio Negro (Black River), so too did the Nalón: when I was a child, the waters in the mid-lower course of the river were like dark chocolate, it was so heavily polluted with charcoal washings from the charcoal production there, but a program to restore the water quality has helped enormously.
The village where my mother was raised, San Esteban de Dóriga, near the River Narcea, had only about thirty inhabitants when she was growing up. It is surrounded by forests, hedgerows, and apple orchards, and although it is part of Spain, it is far from sun-bleached: Asturias has almost double the annual rainfall of London.
Asturias was the kind of place where people would work together for the benefit of the community. If there was a road to be built or the forest needed clearing to stop forest fires, everyone joined forces and gave their time for nothing. I am sure life in Britain was once like this too. The traditions and landscape of Asturias, with its corners of almost untouched land, deeply affected my attitude toward wild habitats and their conservation.
About twenty miles from where I lived was an industrial town called Avilés. It was, and still is, highly polluted and was recently claimed to be the most polluted town in Spain. When I was young, you could smell the town five miles before you reached it, and if you were unlucky enough to have to go there, you always ended up with streaming eyes or a hacking cough. In 1980, a report in the newspaper El País stated that six out of ten people seen in the local hospital emergency room were there because of respiratory problems such as chronic bronchitis.
It seemed incredible that you could have both of these scenarios within twenty miles of each other. On one hand, there was rich biodiversity, wildlife, and rugged scenery, and on the other an industrial, polluting nightmare, suffocating the life around it. All that was good and bad on the earth was there. Having seen both up close, I knew which side I wanted to choose.
By the time I was five, I was looking after the plants at school and had become the authority on natural history for my friends. If I didn’t know the answers to their questions I would go home and ask my mother or look in books until I found out. When I was older, I read all six volumes of an encyclopedia called Natural Science, from cover to cover—twelve times. As they were expensive, my father said I should read them only if I rested them on a table, but I would take them to the bathroom, lock myself in, and sit there for hours. My family still has them.
Natural history soon became my sole passion and interest. I knew the names of all the fish in our aquarium, the birds that flew around the town, and the plants in the fields and surrounding streets. Back then we didn’t have the same focus on television and social media as children do now; to keep ourselves entertained we played with our dogs or looked after parrots or exotic birds or went walking in the surrounding countryside. I learned how to care for my pets, looked up the places where they came from, and studied how they lived. We had an English canary called Manolito. He sang so loudly that at lunchtime we had to cover his cage with a cloth—it was the only way you could hear yourself talk. I also kept exotic birds such as Speke’s weavers, cut-throat finches, and an American northern cardinal (which was probably my favorite). My father built a large aviary in the orchard of our finca—Spanish for a rural or agricultural piece of land, usually with a cottage. And from then on the list of birds and pets grew and grew. In the end I had so many pets that my parents imposed a ban on anymore feathery or furry family members.
A man named Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente was my hero. He was a medical doctor and was into hunting and rural pursuits, so he understood nature—to catch something, you have to understand the ways of your prey. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he and a few English people resurrected the art of falconry in Spain, mostly using medieval books. In 1975, he became the presenter of a natural history program called El Hombre y la Tierra (The Man and the Earth). In this show he would do things like raise a goshawk, and also find a pair that was nesting, then combine shots of the trained bird with sequences of those in the wild, so viewers could compare how these birds lived and caught their prey. He also raised a pack of wolf cubs and trained them as hunting dogs, so if he wanted to film a pack of wolves chasing a deer he could release them and accurately predict where they would go, sometimes over several miles, positioning cameras along the route to film them as they ran. In much the same style as David Attenborough, he was an incredible narrator—intense, dramatic, and almost poetic at times. The funky psychedelic music that accompanied the images only intensified my love for the show.
My mother said that from as young as two years old, I would be asleep in bed, but as soon as the show’s music started I would come crawling from my room and sit on the floor in front of the television, transfixed. I was a fan for many years. When people asked my friends, brothers, and sister what they wanted to be when they grew up, their answers ranged from a football player to a bullfighter to a fireman—sometimes even a general. I didn’t know the word to describe the job Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente did, but I wanted to be just like him (and I still do).
Some of the images he created were unbeatable. I don’t think that even Attenborough and the BBC had produced anything like them at that time. He mixed poetic descriptions and surrealism with scientific information. Because he knew animal psychology, he could anticipate what they would do. He would put carrion in the flight path of an eagle, with cameras focused on critical points, knowing that at some point the eagle would see the prey and pick it up and he could film what happened in detail.
Excerpt from The Plant Messiah. © Sr. Don Carlos Magdalena 2017
