Up to 180 European bison now roam rural areas of Spain despite the opposition of scientists and government bodies.
In the land of the bull, the European bison seems somewhat out of place.
History and archaeology buffs will be quick to point out that the Altamira Cave in northern Spain has paintings of bison-like animals dating back between 36,000 and 13,000 years ago, but this was believed to be a Bison priscus, which went extinct around 9,000 years ago.
The truth is researchers are not sure yet whether the Bison bonasus – the scientific name for the European bison – ever roamed Spain.
Speed forward to the present and there are now around 180 European bison living in the country.
The first ones were introduced to the country in 2010, when a group of seven of them were brought over from Poland to live in the sparsely populated province of Palencia.
Over the years, more of them have been introduced into different areas of the country, although this hasn’t been a concerted effort by Spanish authorities.
In April 2024, the European Bison Conservation Centre (EBCC) introduced another two European bison herds to an estate in the foothills of Montes de Toledo, near Ciudad Real.
Currently, there are bison living in several Spanish regions: Castilla y León, Cantabria, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura and Andalusia.
So who is behind the introduction of el bisonte in Spain and why are they doing it?
It has been mainly individuals and non-government organisations who have brought them over to live on private estates and mountain reserves.
It turns out bison are not considered protected wildlife in Spain, but rather are classified as livestock or zoological creatures.
Such classification requires them to be controlled, geolocated and monitored rather than simply let out into the wild, although this hasn’t prevented them from being brought to Spain in the first place.
This leads us with the question of why are bison being introduced to Spain in the first place. It’s not for hunting, profit or animal conservation, at least not most recently.
It turns out bison make fantastic firefighters.
A group of researchers are advocating for their introduction in Spain to try to curb the waves of forest fires that ravage the country every summer.
“They don’t compete with anyone; we have pasture for bison and for our deer or cattle, ” Jesús González, conservation director of Bison Bonasus, told La Sexta News.
“They eat a lot of plants” because their diet includes up to 180 different plants, he added, arguing that this makes them suitable animals for promoting biodiversity and not eating up the pastures of endemic herbivores.
A project involving several universities now proposes using bison as an indirect grazing tool against forest fires in Spain.
In simple terms, less accumulated vegetation means less fuel during the scorching summer months.
“If you have 10 bison in the forest for 20 years, could we have fires? Well, maybe, but they will spread more slowly,” González says.
Private landowners and nature reserves who’ve ‘hired’ bison as a fire-prevention tool swear by their abilities.
Raúl Rodríguez and Víctor Manuel Alonso brought European bison to their 240‑hectare finca on the outskirts of Madrid in 2025, and when wildfires ravaged large swathes of land around the Spanish capital this summer, they lost 160 hectares. One plot was spared, though.
“They created a natural firebreak, the entire ground where the bison roamed was untouched,” they told Spanish daily El Mundo.
However, not everyone is in favour of bison being used as bomberos (firefighters in Spanish).
A large coalition of ecologists, palaeontologists, and conservation scientists, including researchers from over 25 scientific institutions such as the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), have strongly objected to them being introduced in Spain.
Scientists warn that southern and central Spain’s hot, arid and Mediterranean climate imposes extreme physiological stress on the animals.
They also believe that introducing a 1,000+ kg non-native herbivore into Mediterranean ecosystems poses ecological risks by destroying certain plants and collapsing rabbit burrows.
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Furthermore, they argue that existing native species including deer and the Iberian ibex, as well as other livestock, perform grazing and brush-clearing better than bison do, and are far better suited to the local vegetation.
All this may well be true, but what’s clear is that the European bison’s introduction is largely a reaction to what many people in rural Spain consider to be a failed plan by national and regional governments to combat increasingly devastating forest fires.
Many locals state that getting official approval to clear land in protected or restricted zones takes too long or involves confusing paperwork.
There’s also the fact that traditional farming and livestock grazing are dwindling in Spain, resulting in fewer animals eating the wild grass, in turn leading to heavy brush growth.
And with fewer people living in the Spanish countryside overall, large areas of woodland remain completely unmanaged.
In February of this year, a 4,000-year-old bison skeleton was found in the northern region of Navarre.
Could it be that the European bison was indeed once endemic to the Iberian Peninsula?
