Due to its location and geographical and climatic characteristics, the Iberian Peninsula is a territory that is home to a great variety of ecosystems. Coupled with its diverse cultural heritage, its cultural landscape is also very rich and heterogeneous.
Three biogeographic regions converge on Spanish territory : the Eurosiberian in the north and northwest, the Mediterranean in much of the peninsula and the Balearic Islands, and the Macaronesian in the Canary Islands. In turn, each region has characteristic soils, which closely depend on the type of rock, the climate, the vegetation, as well as the time elapsed since its formation and the incidence of human activities. The relief of Spain is also very varied: great plains, many kilometers of coastline bathed by different seas, islands, high mountains, deserts, hills, wetlands …
All this means that in our country you can see very diverse landscapes. This is how the botanist Pius Font i Quer expressed it in his work Geography of Spain and Portugal (and cited in the book Iberian forests ): “A territory of such varied morphology, with extensive plains, extensive plateaus, high mountain ranges that reach and even They exceed 3,000 meters in height, with all kinds of rocks and very varied soils , subjected to climates of the most diverse conditions, bathed by three seas and with extensive coasts, it is natural that it offers us a flora of great diversity of species and a thousand aspects varied of its vegetation ”.
With such a rich landscape, it is very difficult to make a selection from a few privileged places. The list, really, would be infinite, so in this photographic gallery we have tried to represent at least one landscape of each community, as well as the great heterogeneity mentioned above. Some are emblematic spaces, known internationally and that, surely, many of the readers have visited. Others are not so famous, but they contain characteristics that make them unique or peculiar. In addition, we wanted to highlight spaces whose survival is in a critical state, in order to draw attention to the importance of their conservation. A paradigmatic example is that of the Doñana marshes which, despite being one of the most important wetlands in Europe, have suffered from over-exploitation and contamination of their aquifers for decades.
