Spain's forest cover has grown 50% since 1970, yet the landscape still looks barren

Spain's forest cover has grown 50% since 1970, yet the landscape still looks barren

Is Spain a barren wasteland? The question, a recurring one at any dinner-table conversation, has an uncomfortable answer: it depends on what you measure. The official figures —the ones cited in reports and that an AI repeated without blinking— say that forest land has grown by nearly 50% since the 1970s, now exceeding 28 million hectares, more than half of the country's territory. But the traveller crossing Castile in August sees no forests, only stubble fields. And they have a point.

The debate, revived these days on a history forum, pits two narratives against each other that are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, rural depopulation and economic transition have allowed scrubland and trees to colonise former farmland. On the other, the Mediterranean climate, with long dry summers, and certain farming practices —burning, overexploitation, non-native species— have left a landscape that, at first glance, still looks like a desert.

The figure that contradicts perception: more trees than 40 years ago

The number is stubborn: since the 1970s, Spain's forest area has grown by 50%. What used to be marginal cereal fields are now scrubland and pines that nobody planted. The main cause is not visionary forestry policy but the collapse of traditional agriculture. People left the countryside for the city, and the countryside simply closed over.

That growth, however, does not translate into a lush landscape. Much of the new forest cover is scrub, not mature woodland. And the forest that remains is subject to recurrent wildfires, increasingly intense droughts and management that is conspicuously absent. The result is a territory that, on paper, is greener; to the eye, it is still ochre.

Why do the south and the interior still look like scorched earth?

Because, in part, they are. The Mediterranean climate imposes a long, dry summer that turns any landscape into a tinderbox. But there is more: the comparison with France, Germany or Belgium is odious because those countries have humid oceanic or continental climates. In Spain, aridity is not an anomaly; it is the norm across much of the territory.

Even so, some argue that the degradation has specific culprits. People talk about deliberately set fires, machines that raze everything in their path, invasive species and forest management that prioritises firefighting over prevention. Also of poorly understood extensive livestock farming and stubble burning as an age-old practice. The result is a landscape that recovers in fits and starts.

The satellite data paradox: green in spring, brown in October

A satellite image of Valladolid in May shows a green blanket that deceives. In October, the same province appears brown, ploughed up, almost desert-like. This is dryland farming: wheat, barley, sunflowers. Crops that are born with the rain and die with the sun. It is not a permanent wasteland, but it looks like one for half the year.

That seasonality explains why forest cover statistics fail to convince anyone who travels through the interior. Wooded area may be growing, but the visual impression is still that of a battered territory. And it does not help that rural depopulation has left empty villages and unploughed fields, which sometimes favours scrubland but not necessarily forest.

The underlying debate: the Muslim invasion, Rome or the climate?

The forum's original question pointed to the Muslim invasion as the cause of alleged massive deforestation. The most repeated answer was different: the climate and poor farming practices, with parallels in Turkey, Italy or North Africa. Rome and its fleet were also mentioned, which according to some forums was supplied with Spanish timber. There is no data in the discussion to confirm any of these hypotheses, but the implicit consensus is that Spain's aridity predates any invasion.

What does seem clear is that the Spanish landscape is not static. It has changed with the climate, the economy and human decisions. And it will keep changing. The question is not whether Spain is a wasteland, but how much of that wasteland is natural and how much is the consequence of how we have treated it.

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In the end, the discussion gets lost in a detail nobody disputes: in summer, in the middle of Castile, the heat is scorching. And that, with forest or without it, no statistic can fix.