NATIONAL parks in Spain saw a record 15 million visitors last year, representing a 77% rise since 1997, according to recently-released figures.
With 15 National Parks in the country, this works out at one million for each one in 2016 – 83,333 per park every month, 19,231 a week or 2,747 a day.
The most-visited and the best-known is the Teide in Tenerife, where tourists can climb right into the crater of a 3,781-metre-high dormant volcano – and in fact, nearly 4.1 million did so last year.
Other National Parks which enjoyed a huge rise in visitor numbers were the Sierra Nevada in the province of Granada – Spain's most famous skiing destination in winter and a favourite with hikers in summer – the 2,000-metre-high Picos de Europa mountains (pictured) on the Cantabria-Asturias border, and the Atlantic Islands off the coast of the north-western region of Galicia.
The Picos de Europa saw the third-highest number of visitors, at just over 2.1 million, just behind the Sierra de Guadarrama – a mountain range to the north-west of the region of Madrid and spilling into the province of Segovia (Castilla y León), where well over 2.4 million tourists made a trip in 2016.
Fourth highest for numbers of visitors was the Timanfaya National Park, an eerie desert-lunar landscape on the island of Lanzarote, which 1.7 million tourists visited.
The Sierra Nevada, Spain's largest National Park at over 35,000 acres, was graced with 734,539 visitors, not far behind the Garajonay National Park on the tiny Canarian island of La Gomera, with 870,486 tourists.
Other National Parks which became a destination of choice for over half a million holidaymakers were the Ordesa and Monte Perdido in the region of Aragón, with 608,950; the Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici, in the land-locked Catalunya province of Lleida, with 586,334, and the Caldera de Taburiente on La Palma in the Canary Islands, with 509,183.
Galicia's Atlantic islands are lesser-known outside of Spain – idyllic, bracing, remote and verdant with an ancient Celtic feel, they comprise the Cíes Isles, the Ons Isles, the Sálvora and the Cortegada Isles, and welcomed 400,465 visitors last year, the highest number ever since they were declared a National Park in 2002.
At the extreme opposite of the mainland, the Doñana National Park – a coastal wetland which spreads across the far southern provinces of Cádiz and Huelva and a regular holiday haunt for Spain's president, Mariano Rajoy – welcomed 288,637 travellers in 2016, or 288,635 not counting Rajoy and his wife Elvira.
The Monfragüe National Park in Cáceres, in the western region of Extremadura, was declared as such 10 years ago and has seen its highest number of visitors at 280,319.
Lesser-visited National Parks include the Tablas de Daimiel in the centre-southern province of Ciudad Real, with 181,106 tourists; the uninhabited Cabrera islands in the Balearics, with 124,326 visitors, and the Cabañeros, also in Ciudad Real, with 104,565.
The total for all 15 comes to exactly 15,013,412 over 2016, a figure that has risen by half a million since 2015 – when visitors totalled 14,429,535 – and a whopping 77% more than in the year 1996 when numbers were first documented and just 8.47 million were recorded.
