Spain has some of the most spectacular natural landscapes in Europe, and an increasing number of people want to visit them. This is, in principle, a good thing — people who experience wild places are more likely to support their protection. But the concentration of visitors in a small number of iconic locations is creating real problems, and the solutions are not always obvious.
The most visited natural spaces in Spain — the Teide National Park in Tenerife, the Ordesa valley in the Pyrenees, the Caminito del Rey in Málaga — now receive visitor numbers that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. The infrastructure has not kept pace. The result is erosion, wildlife disturbance, and an experience that is, for many visitors, considerably less rewarding than they expected.
The Practical Alternatives
The most straightforward advice is to go somewhere else. Spain has seventeen national parks, hundreds of natural parks, and thousands of kilometres of marked trails that receive a fraction of the visitors that the famous locations attract. The landscapes are often equally spectacular. The experience is almost always better.
If you do visit a popular location, the timing matters enormously. Weekday visits in shoulder season — April to early June, September to October — are dramatically less crowded than summer weekends. The wildlife is also more active and more visible in these periods.
Leave No Trace
The principles are simple and widely known: take your rubbish with you, stay on marked paths, do not disturb wildlife, do not pick plants. The difficulty is that they require a degree of self-discipline that not everyone exercises. If you are travelling with children, the conversation about why these things matter is worth having before you arrive, not after.