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The mountain savanna is the foundational landscape of Northgrippian Park: the living setting in which, much later, the rock paintings, the Vetton hillfort, and the goat herders’ shepherds’ dwellings appeared. Its scattered oaks, Mediterranean shrublands, and broad open clearings are not merely a backdrop, but the living vegetation memory of the land. Every human story encountered along the route began, flourished, and disappeared within this extraordinarily biodiverse landscape.
Its history may reach back at least to the beginning of the Northgrippian, the middle stage of the Holocene, which began around 8,200 years ago. Palaeoecological research in Gredos shows that these mountains have supported diverse, dynamic, and often open landscapes for millennia, shaped by climate, fire, herbivores, and, with increasing intensity, human societies. To look across this savanna today is to glimpse a time when nature retained far greater autonomy: trees grew and died, fire moved across the slopes, and animals opened paths without every corner being shaped by human decisions. Later came hunters, shepherds, and settlements; they depended on the landscape and may also have transformed it to some extent. Yet beneath all those layers of history, an older nature still endures, only imperfectly domesticated and still claiming the space to continue its own story.
Rural abandonment and the near-total disappearance of grazing have disrupted part of the balance that kept this landscape open for centuries: where numerous herds once grazed, shrubland is now advancing and threatening to close the savanna little by little. Far fewer large herbivores also remain than probably roamed these mountains in the past. Yet those who complete the route at dawn or during the last hours of the day may still come across a herd of deer attempting to reclaim the clearings and watch large birds of prey soaring above Gredos, including the Iberian imperial eagle—recovering and increasingly present in Ávila—and, with a little luck, a bearded vulture linked to the projects working for its return to these mountains. We hope that, in the coming years, this place will not only preserve a relict vegetation that may once have covered much of the Iberian mountains and now seems to have found one of its last refuges here, but will also become home to an increasingly rich fauna: animals that inhabited this land before us and may still find in it a place to return to.
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Perhaps this is where its greatest value lies: not only in preserving an exceptional vegetation, but in reminding us that this land had a history before us and may once again have a future less subject to our control. The mountain savanna of Gredos is not merely a relic of the past; it is also an invitation to imagine a form of coexistence in which humanity is no longer the sole author of the landscape.
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