In 1911 a railway engineer was reading Country Life magazine while waiting to board a boat for Chile at a London port when he saw an advertisement reading “For Sale – Doñana”. Wasting no time the engineer, Manuel María González Gordón rushed to the nearest telegraph office and sent the following message to his father in Jeréz de la Frontera - “Dad, Doñana is for sale. Buy it. If you don’t have any money, get it. I’ll leave everything and come back to work as a gamekeeper or whatever you like.”
Unfortunately, his father, Pedro González Soto, (later the owner of Bodegas González-Byass), did not do as his son asked, but Manuel María set off for Chile in the belief he would.
The wetlands and dunes of the Doñana National Park are now among the most important natural areas of South-West Europe. Experts come from all over the world to study the magnificent bird, animal and plant life. Doñana, with its 50,000 hectares of national parkland and additional buffer zones of 23,000 hectares, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Although still under threat from a number of sourcesthe area remains a wildlife haven largely thanks to the efforts of three of the founding fathers of Spanish ornithology and conservationism –Francisco Bernis, Jose Antonio Valverde and Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente.
In 1940, Manuel María González, the Marqués del Mérito y Salvador Noguera, got together and bought 16,500 hectares of the area north of what is known as Coto de Doñana or de Doña Ana (named after the duchess Doña Ana Gómez de Mendoza de Silva y de la Cerda, who lived in the place that is still known as the Palacio de Doñana in the 17th century).
Doñana was their passion, and the González family would spend decades enjoying what was then considered the best hunting in Europe, (especially by the English who discovered these lands thanks to Sir Francis Drake who took one and a half million litres of wine back to Britain after pillaging Cádiz in 1587). It was, however, Mauricio, Manuel María’s son, who took his passion for the Doñana to extremes. When he married in 1951, he was rich enough to be able to afford a luxurious honeymoon. Instead he took his wife to Doñana. It was Mauricio González Diez, who would play host to Francisco Bernis and José Antonio Valverde when they visited Doñana in 1952 – a visit that would leave its mark on the history of post-war ecology, when the three of them formed the first Spanish Society of Ornithology (SEO) and devised a strategy which would culminate in the Doñana being declared a national park.

Francisco Bernis
By the time Bernis visited the park, he had already travelled around much of Spain pursuing his passion for birdwatching. So obsessed was he with birdwatching that while on military service he narrowly escaped serious punishment for using his anti-aircraft gun to observe the migratory habits of birds instead of being on the look out for the enemy. Once he was arrested by the Guardia Civil who thought he was a rebel and on another occasion arrested by police in the Portuguese mountains who were tracking a rapist.
Francisco read natural sciences at university and then found a job as a secondary school teacher in Lugo. It was here that he began work on founding the first ever ‘stork centre’ in Spain. Using his own money, he printed a thousand cards, which he sent to schoolteachers, priests, mayors, etc, asking how many storks’ nests there were in their towns and requesting other information. Very few responded, but he pressed on with this and other plans, meaning he is now recognised as the real founder of Spanish scientific ornithology. Until that time, ornithology in Spain depended on foreign initiatives. In fact the saying went “En España, ave que vuela, a la cazuela” (in Spain, every bird that flies goes in the cooking pot) or “En España, un ave es un ser comestible o no comestible” (in Spain a bird is either edible or non-edible).
In 1960, with the help of the Juan March foundation for the Centre of Bird Migration, which had been created three years before, he bought a Citroën 2 CV which would become famous on the Spanish roads. “You again, Don Francisco,” the Guardia Civil would say, when they saw the tailbacks of traffic building up behind him when he slowed down watch movements among the trees.

José Antonio Valverde
One of the first to recognise Bermis’ scientific work was José Antonio Valverde. The men became friends at the end of the forties and were not only great ornithologists but also the fathers of modern Spanish conservationism, bringing the great marshlands to public attention.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, marshlands had been systematically destroyed, and were considered no more than filthy swamps. Many genuine inland seas such as the lake of Antela in Orense, la Nava in Palenicia and almost half of all Spanish marshlands had already been destroyed. Bernis and Valverde highlighted their importance as leisure areas and home to thousands of migratory birds from other European countries.

Migratory birds
Doñana was especially important as a winter home for migratory birds, as were the Ebro Delta, Gallocanta, la Albufera, Villafáfila and las Tablas de Daimiel.
Until this time, only mountains were deemed worthy of protection. In fact the only national parks in Spain were Covadonga and Picos de Europa (1918) and Ordesa (1920). Bernis and Valverde were to change all this by reclaiming the marches.
When they discovered Doñana, Bermis was already an important professor, but Valverde was still studying. But he had read all the libraries in Valladolid. At 17 years old he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, requiring months of convalescence. When he was nineteen, he told his friends quite matter-of-factly “As the doctors say I am not going to live to 30, I want to do something important, and as the subject I know most about is birds, I want to concentrate on them”.
Among these friends was José Manuel Recio, a skilled hunter, who has been lucky enough to have a grandfather who had given up his medical practice to teach his grandchildren the secrets of nature. Recio would be one of Valverde’s most important patrons; he turned his house into a zoo, full of wild animals and amazingly, in his own bed, using razor blades, knives, scissors and a few other instruments, Valverde became a consummate taxidermist. He eventually opened a workshop, from which he raised money to fund his expeditions.

Rodríguez de la Fuente
One day in 1952, Féliz Rodriguez de la Fuente paid a visit. He was studying medicine in Valladolid, had heard that Valverde knew a lot about falconery and wanted to learn from him. Shortly afterwards, they captured their first falcon together. The three people who would most influence ecology in Spain had now met,  but Rodríguez de la Fuente would become infinitely more famous.

To be continued next week.