For the first time in more than 10,000 years, wild horses once again roam Spain’s northwestern highlands. The 35 horses introduced by Rewilding Spain are bringing renewed resilience to the land, Mongabay senior editor Jeremy Hance reported.
In 2023, an initial 16 Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus przewalskii), the world’s last fully wild horse, were introduced to the municipality of Villanueva de Alcorón in Guadalajara, a sparsely populated province two hours from Madrid, Spain’s capital city.
“They are special,” Manuel Villa, a herd manager with Rewilding Spain, told Hance. “For me, every day I go to work is like the first: the same excitement … I always say, ‘God, they are beautiful.’”
Horses are a key element for rewilding the Iberian highlands, which today are mostly made up of land left degraded by abandoned crops and pastures. Through grazing, the horses are helping to restore ecosystem health and prevent wildfires.
“You need the horses to shorten the grass,” said Pablo Schapira, team leader with Rewilding Spain. Overgrown long grass can be a dangerous fire hazard, especially during droughts, as it allows fire to spread quickly across large expanses.
In 2005, a massive wildfire in the region killed 11 people and burned more than 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres). A combination of decades of overgrowth, a lack of megafauna, and climate change has increased the risk of destructive wildfires in the region.
“Rewilding is about restoring lost ecological processes,” said Diego Rodriguez, the monitoring manager of the project. “That can include animals, plants, floods — such as restoring river flood regimes — it can include prescribed fires, and any other ecological process that occurs naturally in an ecosystem without human intervention.”
The reintroduction of horses in the region builds on earlier work: Rewilding Spain previously introduced Taurus cattle, which resemble the wild aurochs that inhabited Europe until their extinction in the 17th century. The group is also building up the rabbit population so it can later reintroduce the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus). It’s also working on bringing back two species of vultures, to add to the ecosystem’s biodiversity.
Today, the reintroduced animals roam roughly 23,000 hectares (57,000 acres) of land, but Rewilding Spain’s ultimate goal is far more ambitious: to eventually rewild roughly 850,000 hectares (2.1 million acres) of land, an area nearly four times the size of Luxembourg,
Read the full story by Jeremy Hance here.
Banner image: Przewalski’s horses in the Villanueva de Alcorón forest in Spain. Image courtesy of Neil Aldridge/Rewilding Europe.
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