A wetland without water
How greed, excess and the failure to love imperilled one of Europe's ecological treasures
From the village of El Rocío, a body of shimmering liquid silver stretched out in front of me. Wildfowl and waders bobbed along the gently rippled surface and flamingos foraged in the distance. Horses grazed on submerged grass, water rising past their fetlocks. Overhead, dozens of house martins glided and turned through the sticky air in pursuit of insects. Soon, Earth and sky would become washed out and weary from the heat. But for now, in the soft glow of fading light, it felt invigorating to be surrounded by these fertile greens and pure blues that only spring offers up.
All this water made it easier for me to picture what Doñana had once been like. When the marshes and ponds teemed with life. When the winter skies were thick with geese, cranes, herons and flamingos. When the dawn chorus was a trumpeting, honking, squawking, trilling cacophony. Before the berry industry boomed. Before the rains stopped arriving like they once had. Before everything started spiralling towards death.
Doñana National Park, an estuary where the Guadalquivir River meets the Atlantic Ocean on Spain’s southwestern coast, is widely regarded as one of Europe’s most important wetlands. It’s a crucial stopover point on the East Atlantic Flyway, with millions of birds feeding and resting in Doñana each spring and autumn during journeys from as far as South Africa to Scandinavia and back. When the rains are good, the park is a critical wintering site for hundreds of thousands of birds, and a key breeding site for scarce and endangered birds, such as marbled ducks, white-headed ducks and Iberian imperial eagles. Its unique and diverse mosaic of ecosystems—marshes, lagoons, ponds, estuaries, dunes, Mediterranean scrub and pine forests—also provides refuge for an array of aquatic, mammal, plant, amphibian and insect species, several of which are endemic or threatened.
However idyllic things appeared following the spring rains, it was deceptive. When the 2023-2024 figures were later released, they showed the park had recorded the lowest number of wintering birds since record-keeping began 50 years ago: 43,989. This was roughly half of the previous record low, in 2021-2022, when the park had recorded 87,500 wintering birds. The average was 470,000.
These plummeting numbers were what had first brought me to Doñana, in the summer of 2022, as part of a cross-border investigative project exploring how intensive berry farming in Iberia was depleting scarce water resources. Ever since, I’d felt haunted by how somewhere so precious, so rich in life, could be so recklessly destroyed. I’d returned in April 2024, after spring rains had finally brought some respite, because I wanted to see the landscape when it was flooded. To imagine how Doñana was, and maybe still could be, in all its lush, watery, bird-rich glory.
For decades, the aquifer sustaining Doñana—a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Ramsar Wetland of International Importance—has been under pressure from unsustainable withdrawals to irrigate intensive, expanding berry crops. It hadn’t always been this way. Traditionally, farmers in the region grew rainfed crops like olives, almonds and wheat, well-suited to the semi-arid climate. In the 1980s, when farmers realized their profits could soar by exporting what became known as “red gold” to Europe, strawberry cultivation took off. In just a few decades, Spain became the world’s largest exporter of strawberries and a leading exporter of raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. European agricultural policies, by favouring irrigated crops over rainfed ones, encouraged farmers to use water.
In 2020, the aquifer was officially declared over-exploited. Its depletion had been hastened by withdrawals from over 1,000 illicit wells lacking legal authority and permission, which the government had turned a blind eye to for decades. In 2024, berry exports from Huelva, the province most of Doñana lies within, exceeded 1.1 billion euros, with the vast majority destined for tables in Germany, France and the UK. An estimated 30,000 tonnes of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries produced via illegal irrigation, about ten percent of total production in Huelva, were sold across European markets this past winter. Because there are no regulations in place to ensure farms obtain water legally, unless supermarkets have implemented their own verification measures, it's impossible for European consumers to know if they’re purchasing berries produced legally or not.
By the time I started working on the project in 2022, scientists had been cautioning about the risks of unsustainable groundwater withdrawals for 35 years. But with Huelva’s economy deeply intertwined with the berry industry, scientists’ warnings that intensive berry cultivation was sucking the aquifer dry had gone unheeded. The conflict seemed intractable.
On a stifling morning that July, I stood with a biologist from SEO/Birdlife, the Spanish Ornithological Society, on the edge of El Rocío, overlooking a parched, treeless expanse. In normal years, there’d still be water in permanent ponds around the park—and with the water, birds. The buzz of cicadas filled the heavy air, punctuated only by the gregarious chattering of house sparrows and the cooing woop-WOO-woop of collared-doves. “Look at the last time it rained here properly,” he said, his voice tinged with anguish as he gestured to the cracked clay soil. “When was it?”
When I arrived that summer, the region was six years into a crippling drought and engulfed by a record heatwave. To this date, July 2022 remains Spain’s hottest month on record. Drought and extreme temperatures fuelled by climate change were exacerbating the unsustainable water withdrawals sucking the aquifer dry. Biologists and ecologists told me the severe and prolonged water shortage was pushing biodiversity into freefall. Marshes and ponds that previously nourished hundreds of thousands of birds and harboured unique plants, fish, amphibians and insects were vanishing. “The structures and functionalities of ecosystems are collapsing,” the SEO/Birdlife biologist told me. “The Doñana we know is disappearing.”
The pain and despair of the biologists and ecologists researching and advocating for Doñana impacted me immensely. There was a sadness in their eyes, a frustration that what they had long-warned of was now unfolding, a weariness that nothing had changed. But they couldn’t give up on Doñana. They cared about it too much. So they carried on each day, heartbroken and angry, but driven by love, doing all they could to try and ensure Doñana would have a future.
Later that summer, the park’s largest permanent pond, which had long-resisted overexploitation and drought to stay flooded year-round, dried up entirely. It would dry up again the following summer—the first time to ever happen two years consecutively. Then again in 2024.
What would become of Doñana? Where would the birds go? Where had they gone since the water started disappearing? Had they survived? Scientists weren’t certain, but thought birds were trying to seek out other wetlands in Europe or North Africa, due to their proximity. This likely lowered their chances of survival. What scientists were certain of was that habitat loss was stalking birds across migration routes, as humans left them fewer and fewer places to rest, eat and breed in ever-worsening conditions. It’s estimated 64% of wetlands have been lost since 1900.
How would a bird feel, after enduring the extreme conditions of the immense Sahara Desert and battling the gusts of the Strait of Gibraltar, arriving to a wetland without water? How, in that discombobulated state, would it decide what to do? Would it head back to wetlands in Morocco? Would it know about the Ebro Delta in eastern Spain? Or the Camargue wetland further north on France’s Mediterranean coast? Would it have the strength to make it? Or would it die on the way? What about species that lived their entire lives in ponds? They couldn’t count on mobility to adapt if the network connecting ponds dried up, leaving them nowhere else to go. They would simply disappear, as scientists had started to observe. As populations crashed, species might experience frustration that they couldn’t reproduce or restlessness when there was nothing to eat. Yet none would understand what was going on: that humans were endangering them and pushing them to extinction.
As the weeks passed, a heavy exhaustion crept into my bones as the heat wore me down. Temperatures pushed into the low 40s, reaching 45.7°C in the next village over one day. I tried to work with the heat by planning my days around it. In the mornings, I’d rush off to interviews, criss-crossing the area to speak with researchers and biologists, berry producers and farmer associations, environmentalists and activists and as many local residents as I could. By 1pm, I’d retreat from the sun to transcribe the day’s conversations and prepare for forthcoming interviews. I’d re-emerge around 6pm, the car’s steering wheel burning to the touch, and in the last hours of light sleuthed around backroads, taking photos of the polytunnels that had overrun the landscape, speaking with migrant workers living in informal settlements in the woods about the racism, exploitation and abuses they faced in the industry and searching for illegal wells I’d been tipped off about.
An undercurrent of human superiority was present in many of my conversations with berry producers and locals. Doñana wasn’t a place to live in harmony with, but an inconvenience preventing further personal enrichment. Water wasn’t something to be shared, but was there for farmers’ taking. “The water isn’t for the ducks!” a disgruntled berry farmer had told a biologist I’d interviewed. Beyond scientists and environmentalists, there was strikingly little concern about the fate of the park and its inhabitants. Nearly all of the berry producers and locals I spoke with insisted that the industry, as it was, could coexist with the park, even though science had been saying otherwise for more than 30 years. Some were more explicit in their disregard for Doñana. One morning, in Lucena del Puerto, where the most illegal wells are located, a man erupted in rage when asked how competing demands for water could be balanced: “This is not Doñana…the land is ours,” he shouted. I wasn’t surprised by the outburst. I’d been warned. Biologists and environmentalists received routine threats and intimidation; some had been forced to relocate to escape the incessant harassment. Journalists’ tires had been slashed. The authorities tasked with closing illegal wells had been met with physical violence.
I returned from the reporting trip depressed. The problem was clear. The trajectory of the park was also clear, in the absence of significant change. What did it say about us when we couldn’t preserve an ecological wonder like Doñana? Is this how it’s going to go? Watching slowly—sometimes not so slowly—as ecosystems and species vanish. Loss after loss unfurling until a place is no longer recognizable. Is this the world we want? A world of out-of-season, flavourless berries instead of one of wetlands that welcome birds who have crossed continents. This unwillingness to share the Earth with all the other creatures who make a home of it, this failure to love, this greed and excess and lack of foresight—all of it swirled and swelled inside of me until something snapped.
When our stories were published, I felt the time and effort we’d put into the project was disproportionate to the muted response: a Spanish translation was shared over a hundred times, while other posts were shared between a handful or a couple dozen of times. Months of work seemed to disappear into a black hole. The feeling of futility gnawed at me. Running up against the limitations of journalism was hardly unique, but that didn’t make it any easier. I’d read accounts of this happening to journalists who’d reported on Syria for years, and more recently on the genocide in Gaza. You report on horrors—be they human or environmental—publish your stories and nothing changes. People continue to be bombed to pieces or friends you spoke to at length about your work continue to buy berries for their breakfasts. But when something haunts you, it doesn’t leave you. So you carry on, documenting the demise of empires or ecosystems. All of us writing about death.
Nothing changes. Until it does.
After the Andalusian regional government started to push through a highly controversial amnesty for farms illegally extracting water, after Spain was taken to the European Court of Justice a second time for not doing enough to protect Doñana and after environmental groups tirelessly advocated to defend the park, years of deadlock came to an end. At the end of 2023, the national and regional governments reached an agreement to abolish destructive agriculture methods and invest 1.4 billion euros in sustainable farming in the Doñana region. Farmers who choose to rewild their land or switch to organic rainfed crops will receive compensation.
All that loss, only to return to what was grown before. A hard lesson—borne almost entirely by the more-than-human world—that we must grow what we can, not what we want. When European consumers purchase berries from Huelva, they may be unaware that each bite carries a steep price. By making informed, ethical and environmentally-conscious decisions, consumers play a vital role in co-creating more sustainable and just food systems. When it comes to berries, this means opting for those grown locally, in-season and, ideally, organically.
Now that one type of human-caused harm will finally, belatedly, be reined in, the future of Doñana will be written by the climate, something we’re still harming and changing. Recharging the aquifer will require several years of plentiful rain. Between autumn 2024 and spring 2025, over 600mm of rain fell on Doñana, exceeding the annual average and flooding the marshes and ponds to levels that hadn’t been seen since 2011. Even so, all that rain only raised the aquifer by 55cm, and in some places a deficit of 20m remains, so severe was the plundering that went on for decades.
I wasn’t able to make it to Doñana to see the replenishment after these rains, which crushed me. But I remembered the glimpse I’d had the year before, and I could imagine. How I’d wake at dawn to walk through a verdant tangle of cork oak and wild olive, the underbrush backlit by the rising sun. The digital whistling crescendo of nightingales and the rushing melody of blackcaps would be welcoming the morning. At a hide on the edge of a vast marsh, mosquitos feasting on any patch of skin they could find, I’d gaze at the spectacle of abundance in front of me: greylag geese, cranes, black-winged stilts, black-tailed godwits, plovers, spoonbills and more feeding in the cool air. In unison, hundreds of honking flamingos would take off, arranging themselves in a long V, and I’d follow them through my binoculars as they became smaller and smaller, wishing them well, as I always do. Hoping they can wing their way around this wetland and world until humans no longer endanger their existence, which is to say, forever.