Aiguamolls de l’Empordà Natural Park

This wetland was once a malarial swamp that people spent a century draining away — and it exists today because a later generation deliberately undid that work, right down to replanting the rice fields their ancestors had cleared, once ecologists realised the paddies were the best bird habitat the marsh had left.

Drained, then deliberately undrained

The Aiguamolls once covered nearly the entire plain around the Bay of Roses — a genuine malarial swampland, much like the larger Ebro Delta further south. Through the 19th century, canals and drainage systematically converted that marsh into farmland, and by the 20th century only fragments of the original wetland survived. Those fragments faced a final threat in the 1970s and 80s: development pressure from the same tourism boom transforming the rest of the Costa Brava. Local organisations and ecologists fought that development back, and in 1983 the Catalan Parliament passed a law protecting what remained — not as untouched wilderness, since almost none of it was untouched anymore, but as a landscape to be actively rebuilt.

When farming became the conservation strategy

What makes the Aiguamolls genuinely unusual is that restoration here didn’t mean removing agriculture — it meant bringing specific crops back. Rice cultivation, which had faded from the plain, was deliberately reintroduced after the park’s creation, once it became clear that flooded rice paddies were exactly the kind of shallow, insect-rich habitat wading birds and waterfowl needed. The park’s cultivated land today mixes winter cereals, sunflowers and fruit trees with rice fields grown specifically because they support the birdlife the park exists to protect — agriculture as an active conservation tool rather than something conservation has to work around.

Second-largest, and still shrinking a century ago

At over 4,800 hectares, the Aiguamolls is Catalonia’s second-largest wetland after the Ebro Delta — a scale that makes its near-total loss in the 19th and early 20th centuries genuinely striking in hindsight. Three integral reserves protect the most sensitive core areas today: Les Llaunes, a network of brackish ponds; Els Estanys, freshwater lakes largely rebuilt since the park’s founding; and Illa de Caramany, a river-meander island of naturally evolving riparian forest on the Fluvià. Otters and white storks, both locally extinct or near-extinct within living memory across much of Spain, are now established permanent residents.

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