LIVING

Last September, however, the Guardia Urbana were summoned to deal with a boar family who had crossed the city’s busy ring road, and penetrated the central barri of Gràcia. The same family had been observed exploring Parc Güell a month earlier. The sight of policemen herding these woodland ungulates through the city streets brought home the fact that Barcelona might need a new strategy for living with its bristly wild neighbours.

At the heart of the boar conflict is the Collserola natural park’s unique situation: a green island at the centre of a densely-populated metropolitan area of three million people, with 150,000 of them living within the boundaries of the park itself, which has struggled with encroaching urbanisation. As humans invade the boars’ habitat, and vice versa, their lives are bound to overlap. Traffic accidents are one of the most serious hazards. Allotments are raided and trashed, rubbish bins are broken into, parks and golf courses ploughed up.

One estimate has the current boar population in Collserola as 900, although it’s difficult to provide an exact figure since they are essentially nocturnal animals and visibility is severely restricted in dense woodland. I asked Francesc Llimona, a biologist working in the park and author of several papers on the subject, if a saturation point had been reached—was Collserola now so full of boars that they were being forced out to make a living in the city?

“They can live in even denser populations than here,” he said. “The problem is the degree to which boars are losing their fear of humans.” This is aggravated by people who actively feed them, entranced by the sight of such powerful-looking mammals, whose heads can appear mounted as fierce hunting trophies, approaching peaceably for a slice of pizza or anything else that’s going. In no time at all, the boars begin to feel at home in an urban environment and become addicted to scavenging for junk food. It’s often a death sentence, as regular offenders will be captured and put down.

But the vast majority of boars prefer to keep their distance from us, and for them, Collserola is an ideal habitat. Large extensions of oak trees satiate their appetite for acorns; in a lean acorn year the boar population will dip. There are streams where they can bathe and coat themselves in mud, essential for keeping parasites at bay and spreading scents in the rutting season. Deep, bramble-filled gullies proliferate, ensuring safe hiding places from the two million visitors the park receives a year.