area, but it also has a lot of opposition. One road sign I passed was liberally daubed with obscenities about the workers’ union UGT, which supports the mine’s reopening. For his part, Carlos Dávila, who works for the Spanish Ornithological Society in Doñana, was also alarmed at the proposal. “This is a very, very bad idea indeed,” he told me. “They say the new mine will be safe, but they said it was safe in 1998 and look what happened. We got the worst ecological disaster in the history of Spain.” What alarms people such as Dávila is the threat that a new mine poses to the intense investment in eco-tourism that has been made in Doñana in recent years. An example is provided at the restaurant Dehesa de Abajo, where you can have a drink or a meal surrounded by trees in which storks and black kites are nesting. Virtually every visitor was equipped with a camera and telescopic lens or a pair of binoculars. There is a clear tourist trade to be made from the birdlife of Doñana. Nor should this be surprising, for this is a truly special place. A vast hemisphere of sky hangs over this utterly flat but certainly not featureless landscape. Birds of every shape and size fill the air and sometimes the road. At one point on my visit, a stork calmly stood in front of our car until it felt ready to fly off. “The trouble is that Spain does not have the public resources