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El Regajal-Mar de Ontígola Nature Reserve

Aranjuez, Las Vegas, Madrid

1 Villages · 6 Monuments · 3 Nature · 2 Activities · 1 Curiosities · 3 Historical milestones · 2 Food and drink

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El Regajal-Mar de Ontígola Nature Reserve

Nature · Aranjuez, Las Vegas, Madrid

A natural area protected since 1994 in the municipality of Aranjuez, with 629 hectares bringing together one of the finest holm oak woods in the Comunidad de Madrid and the artificial lake that Philip II had dammed in 1572, today naturalised as the Mar de Ontígola wetland, next to the El Regajal estate, a Mediterranean semi-desert upland. On its gypsum slopes 75 of the 225 Iberian butterfly species have been recorded; in 1979 the IUCN ranked El Regajal as the world's fifth priority for lepidopteran conservation. The marshy wetland gives shelter to waterfowl. The Mar de Ontígola dam, which supplied water to the Real Sitio from the 16th century until the mid-20th, numbered Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera among its designers, a landmark of the hydraulic engineering of its time.

Photo: Rodelar (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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