Protecting Wild Spain: The Coto Donana, international conservation and avian landscapes

Abstract The article explores how the Coto Donana was understood, protected, and shaped as a national park and nature reserve between the early 1950s and late 1980s. In doing so, the article pays attention to the different valuations that were given to the region over the course of the twentieth century and the distinct cultures of landscape which were formed. The strongest contrast was between the reserving of the region as an elite sporting landscape evident in Chapman’s writings and its re-imagining and re-configuring within ecological science and conservation practice as a nature reserve. In exploring this shaping of the Coto Donana as a changing landscape, my account draws on and seeks to extend the work on cultures of landscape to understand the competing ways of knowing, managing, representing, and valuing the natural environment, as well as the different forms of conduct and pleasure associated with contrasting uses of the land.