Crossbill guides 52 - Crossbill Nature Guide Extremadura

This nature travel guidebook to Extremadura contains routes and background info on landscape, flora and fauna.

• Landscape history
• Ecosystems
• Geology
• Flora and Fauna
• Where to watch birds
• Finding orchids and other wildflowers
• 24 detailed routes with tips for finding wildlife and 22 site descriptions

This guidebook covers autonomous region of Extremadura in the southwestern part of Spain. Extremadura consists of two provinces – Cáceres in the north and Badajóz in the south. Both feature in this guide. All main nature reserves, such as Monfragüe, Llanos de Cáceres, Sierra de las Villuercas, Jerte, Mérida. Cornalvo, Sierra de San Pedro and La Serena are covered in the book.

The Crossbill Guide is a thorough and practical guide for naturalists and nature lovers. It offers background information and detailed routes and site descriptions, plus tips on finding and watching all kinds of wildlife. Each route offers detailed descriptions of where and how to find wildlife and wildflowers. It shows you the characteristics of the landscape and geology. The book offers a mix of (mostly easy) walking routes and car itineraries with stops and short walks.

Extremadura is dominated by dehesas, a unique landscape of extensive open oak woodland and pasture. Dehesas seem more in keeping with an African savannah than part of Europe. Dehesas cover hundreds of thousands of hectares of the rolling Extremaduran hills, their expanses occasionally broken by sudden, rocky mountainous outcrops or steep river gorges. Other areas are devoid of trees and covered instead by a type of steppe of herbs, grasses and tough Retama brooms. Extremadura’s landscape is wild and open, but also has a very attractive face, with flower-lined streams and a profusion of wildflowers in the dehesas.

Dirk Hilbers (NL, 1976), set up the Crossbill Guides Foundation and travels Europe to research the guidebooks. Extremadura is a special place for him as he lived and worked there for a year between high school and university. This is the 4th guide on which he has worked. As a biologist, when not in the field, Dirk Hilbers is a free-lance writer and lecturer in the field of nature education and environmental ethics.