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Breña y Marismas de Barbate Natural Park - Fauna

By Jo Williams

Located on the approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar, the park is an important stopping place for migrating birds, as well as providing an important nesting site for various species of birds on its cliffs, such as cattle egrets, little egrets and yellow-legged gulls.

The pine forest is inhabited by barn owls, common buzzards, kestrels, cuckoos, goldfinches, hoopoes, serins, crested tits, great tits and coal tits, as well as Egyptian mongeese, foxes and weasels.

In the Barbate estuary are ringed plovers, Kentish plovers, dunlins, avocets, grey herons, mallards, little grebes and little egrets. In the mud and sandflats are many molluscs, like cockles, clams and shrimps, while in the water are eels, perch, gilthead bream and sole.

The most important reptile population in the park is that of the endangered chamaleon, which lives mainly in the pine woodland. Others include ocellated lizards, spine-footed lizards, Algerian sand lizards, three-toed skink, horseshoe snakes and Montpellier snakes.

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