Privileged Nature: Ornithologists, Hunters, Sportsmen and the Dawn of Environmental Conservation in Spain, 1850 to 1935

Abstract

This dissertation argues the foundation of Spain's first national park, the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga, was the culmination of a four-century-long historical development in which Spaniards redefined the manner in which they conceived of and interacted with nature. The establishment of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga resulted from two different historical processes, the formation of empirical science in Spain and the pursuit of noble hunting, which converged in the late nineteenth-century in the form of species protection and the environmental conscience it reflected. This environmental conscience permeated discourses on Spanish reinvigoration including those of nobleman, sportsman, and politician Pedro José Pidal y Bernaldo de Quirós whose own articulation of this environmental consciousness materialized in the form of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga which legislatively meshed species and landscape protection for the first time in Spain in 1916.