There is a particular kind of silence in the Spanish countryside that you don’t find in a forest.
It belongs to abandoned farmland.
You come across it quite suddenly. A narrow track climbs between old stone walls, the terraces still visible beneath a tangle of rosemary and young pines. Somewhere there will be a ruined casita, perhaps a rusting water tank and the remains of an irrigation channel. A fig tree might still be growing beside the house, although nobody has collected its fruit for years.
The strange thing is how quickly the place stops looking abandoned.
Lizards occupy the walls. Insects work through the flowering scrub. Birds move between the trees that have established themselves where somebody once grew almonds or olives.
From a distance it looks as though nature has returned.
But returned to what?
That’s the question I keep coming back to when I walk through these places.
The Landscape Was Never Quite Wild
One of the things that surprised me when I first began exploring Spain was how much of the countryside had been shaped by people.
Even the apparently empty hillsides often carry evidence of centuries of occupation.
Terraces climb slopes that seem far too steep to cultivate. Dry stone walls divide fields that have long since disappeared beneath vegetation. Ancient tracks connect settlements whose names have fallen off modern maps.
Some of these landscapes were maintained through extraordinary amounts of physical labour.
Every terrace represented stones collected, carried and carefully arranged. Every olive grove needed pruning. Every grazing pasture depended on animals being moved across it.
The countryside was not simply occupied. It was continually managed.
I wrote about something similar in The Ghosts of Transhumance: Spain’s Forgotten Shepherd Paths. The movement of livestock across the country helped shape vegetation, soil and the distribution of plants and animals.
Remove that movement and the landscape begins to change.
Sometimes quite dramatically.
What Comes Back First?
The first stage of abandonment can be surprisingly productive for wildlife.
Once cultivation stops, annual plants begin occupying the disturbed soil. Grasses spread. Flowering species appear along old field boundaries.
Insects respond to the new vegetation.
Where flowers provide nectar and pollen, bees, butterflies and other pollinators may become more numerous. Seed-eating birds find feeding opportunities. Small mammals use the developing cover.
Then the shrubs arrive.
In Mediterranean Spain that might mean rosemary, thyme, rockrose, lentisk or other plants suited to dry conditions, depending on the soil, climate and previous land use.
Eventually trees may establish themselves.
Aleppo pine is particularly good at colonising suitable abandoned ground in parts of eastern Spain. Holm oak may return more slowly where conditions allow.
Ecologists call this process secondary succession.
It sounds rather tidy when described in a textbook.
On the ground it is anything but.
Different patches develop at different speeds. One abandoned terrace might become dense scrub while the neighbouring field remains mostly grass. A north-facing slope may support young woodland while the exposed southern side struggles through another dry summer.
And some places barely change at all.
Thin soils, drought, browsing animals and repeated fires can interrupt the process for decades.
Nature does not follow a timetable.
The Trouble With Calling Everything Rewilding
There is a temptation to celebrate every abandoned field as a conservation success.
I understand it.
After years spent watching habitats disappear, seeing vegetation reclaim a piece of agricultural land can feel enormously encouraging.
But abandonment and ecological recovery are not necessarily the same thing.
A traditional farming landscape may support species that depend on open ground.
Certain orchids flourish in lightly managed grassland. Some butterflies require particular food plants that disappear when scrub becomes too dense. Ground-nesting birds can lose suitable habitat as trees establish themselves.
A hillside that appears greener after twenty years may actually support fewer of the species that occupied it when farming continued.
This is one of the awkward truths of Mediterranean conservation.
More trees do not automatically mean more biodiversity.
In some places, the most valuable habitat is a mosaic of open pasture, scattered trees, scrub and cultivated land.
Remove the people and animals that maintained that mixture and the balance changes.
The result may be excellent habitat for some species and unsuitable for others.
Conservation is rarely as straightforward as leaving everything alone.
The Fire Question
There is another complication.
Fire.
Traditional agriculture and grazing often kept vegetation relatively open. Livestock consumed grasses and young shoots. Farmers cleared undergrowth, maintained tracks and cultivated strips of land that interrupted the continuity of combustible vegetation.
When these activities cease, shrubs and young trees can spread across formerly open ground.
Under certain conditions, that creates more continuous fuel for a wildfire.
It doesn’t mean abandoned farmland will inevitably burn. Fire behaviour depends on weather, topography, vegetation, fuel moisture and a great many other factors.
But in a Mediterranean climate, where prolonged summer drought is normal, the accumulation and arrangement of vegetation matter enormously.
A hillside covered in young pines and dense scrub can behave very differently from a landscape broken into grazed pasture, olive groves and patches of woodland.
This is why some conservation projects actively reintroduce grazing rather than exclude it.
Sheep, goats and occasionally larger herbivores can help maintain open habitats and reduce certain types of vegetation.
The animals are not simply agricultural machinery.
They are part of the ecological process.
And in many parts of Spain they have been for centuries.
The Stone Walls Still Have a Job
One of my favourite features of abandoned agricultural land is the dry stone wall.
A farmer might have built it to hold back soil or mark the edge of a field.
A century later it may be functioning as a small wildlife refuge.
The gaps between stones provide shelter for reptiles and invertebrates. Small mammals can use the crevices. Plants establish themselves in accumulated pockets of soil.
The wall also creates differences in temperature and moisture over remarkably short distances.
Its sun-facing side can become warm enough for basking reptiles while shaded cavities remain cooler.
A few metres of old masonry can offer a surprising variety of conditions.
And unlike a modern concrete retaining wall, the structure often remains permeable to small creatures.
It is a reminder that human structures do not always lose their ecological value when their original purpose disappears.
Sometimes they acquire a second one.
I find this particularly interesting because we tend to divide landscapes into two categories: natural and artificial.
The animals are considerably less concerned about the distinction.
A Different Kind of Wildlife Corridor
Abandoned farmland can also help reconnect fragmented habitats.
An old agricultural strip between two patches of woodland may gradually develop enough vegetation to provide cover for animals moving between them.
Field boundaries, terraces, hedgerows and uncultivated margins can form a loose network across the countryside.
Not every species will use these spaces in the same way. A fox may cross a scrub-covered field quite happily while an animal dependent on mature woodland may find it unsuitable.
Nevertheless, the structure of the landscape matters.
In The Spaces Between: Why Nature Needs Corridors, Not Islands, I explored how easily apparently healthy habitats can become isolated by roads, fences and development.
Abandoned agricultural land sometimes offers an opportunity to repair those connections.
The challenge is deciding what sort of habitat should develop there.
A continuous woodland corridor might benefit certain mammals. A mixture of grassland and scrub could be more useful for other species.
Simply allowing vegetation to grow is one possible approach.
It is not always the best one.
The Human Cost of an Empty Landscape
There is something else that bothers me about the romantic language surrounding rural abandonment.
It tends to overlook the people who left.
A ruined farmhouse makes an attractive photograph. So does an olive grove disappearing beneath wild vegetation.
But these places were once somebody’s livelihood.
Families maintained terraces because they needed the crops. Shepherds crossed the hills because livestock provided an income. Villages existed because the surrounding land could support them.
When those economic relationships became unsustainable, people moved away.
Sometimes to the nearest town. Sometimes to Madrid, Barcelona or another country altogether.
The resulting vegetation may be interesting from an ecological perspective, but that doesn’t make the underlying social history a success.
I touched on this in Spain’s Forgotten Landscapes: A Biologist’s First Impressions, when I was still trying to understand how a country could contain so many apparently empty places.
I am beginning to think that emptiness is the wrong word.
The people have gone, but their work remains everywhere.
In the walls, the paths, the water channels and the shapes of the hillsides.
Even the wildlife that occupies these places is responding to a landscape those people helped create.
Should We Bring the Farmers Back?
Perhaps that is the wrong question too.
Not every abandoned terrace can or should return to agriculture.
Some soils are exhausted. Some slopes are difficult to work economically. Water is increasingly uncertain in parts of Mediterranean Spain.
And there are places where allowing woodland to recover makes good ecological sense.
But there is also a strong argument for maintaining certain traditional farming systems.
Extensive grazing, carefully managed olive groves and low-intensity agricultural landscapes can support wildlife that would struggle in either intensive farmland or dense woodland.
The important thing is understanding what already exists before deciding what ought to replace it.
That requires fieldwork.
Not just satellite images showing an increase in green vegetation, but actual surveys of plants, insects, birds, reptiles and mammals.
It requires attention to soil, water, fire and the connections between habitats.
And, perhaps most importantly, it requires listening to the people who still know how these landscapes function.
A shepherd who has spent forty years moving animals across a hillside may notice changes that a visiting ecologist would miss completely.
That knowledge deserves more respect than it sometimes receives.
What the Land Remembers
I keep thinking about those old terraces.
The ones where the walls are slowly collapsing and the almond trees have grown twisted through years without pruning.
There is no obvious boundary between the agricultural past and the ecological present.
A lizard occupies a wall built by a farmer. A bird nests in a tree planted for its fruit. Wildflowers grow in soil that somebody spent a lifetime keeping in place.
It is all connected.
Perhaps the mistake is imagining that nature begins where human activity ends.
In much of Spain, the two have been entangled for so long that separating them is almost impossible.
The question is not whether abandoned farmland should become wild again.
It is what kind of living landscape we want it to become, and which species we hope will still be there when the old walls finally fall.