Bardenas Reales — protected area
Image by alterRPC from Pixabay

Bardenas Reales

  • Elevation650 m
  • 2 min read
  • 42.190° N 1.500° W

Interesting facts

  • On screen the Bardenas became the Dothraki Sea in Game of Thrones and a Kazakh nuclear site in the 1999 Bond film The World Is Not Enough.
  • Castildetierra, the clay chimney that symbolises the park, is so fragile that under ordinary weather its remaining life has been estimated at only about four decades.
  • The name first surfaces around 915–916 in an Arabic chronicle of a battle, which records the place as jabal al-Bardà.
  • Since 1951 the Spanish Air Force has rented 2,244 hectares in the middle of the badlands for bombing practice, using dummy bombs without explosives.
  • Beneath the gullies lie roughly four kilometres of sediment laid down in the closed Ebro basin, which only broke through to the Mediterranean about ten million years ago.
  • More than a hundred bird species nest here, among them about twenty breeding birds of prey and some 250 pairs of the rare Dupont's lark.
  • Surveys have catalogued 267 archaeological sites in the Bardenas, from Bronze and Iron Age settlements to 41 Roman sites and at least 15 medieval villages.
  • The Bardena Blanca receives only about 300 mm of rain a year, while summer heat has reached 44°C and the cold cierzo wind sweeps in from the north-west.
  • According to legend, Blanca I of Navarre was locked in the tower of Peñaflor by her father for refusing to marry Martin the Younger, heir of Aragon.
  • Height across the whole area varies only between about 280 and 659 metres, yet erosion has carved this narrow range into a maze of canyons and buttes.

Why it is worth it

The Bardenas Reales are a pocket of desert in the south-east of Navarre: some 42,000 hectares of clay, chalk and sandstone carved by rain and wind into canyons, flat-topped mesas and solitary buttes, the cabezos. There are no towns inside and almost no permanent water; streams run only after storms.

The most spectacular part is the Bardena Blanca in the centre, named for the pale, salt-crusted gypsum soils. Here the erosion is most intense, and hard caps of sandstone protect softer clay beneath, leaving isolated pillars. The best known is Castildetierra, a slender chimney of clay under a sandstone lid that has become the emblem of the region and the textbook example of how the badlands form. To the north lies the cultivated plateau of El Plano; to the south, on the border with Aragon, the higher Bardena Negra, darker and more wooded. The small Rincón del Bú reserve, protected since 1986, is a breeding ground of the eagle owl, and golden eagles and Egyptian vultures hunt over the gullies.

The name "Reales" reflects an unusual history. The land belonged to the Navarrese Crown and belongs to no municipality; since the Middle Ages its grazing and farming rights have been shared by a fixed community of 22 bodies, today 19 towns, two Pyrenean valleys and a monastery, confirmed in perpetuity by Philip V in 1705. Flocks from the Pyrenean valleys of Roncal and Salazar have wintered here since at least the ninth century, and transhumance along the old drove roads continues. On a butte stand the ruins of Peñaflor castle, which legend links to Queen Blanca I of Navarre. The Bardenas became a natural park in 1999 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 2000; an air force firing range of some 2,200 hectares in the middle is excluded from the park.

Getting there

Tudela is the nearest town, about 17 km away; the NA-125 road to Ejea de los Caballeros and the NA-126 to Tauste skirt the area, and the town of Arguedas is a common way in from the west. Pamplona Airport (PNA) is about 65 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Spain 150The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in Spain 9The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in Spain 19The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries 91The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232

From the encyclopaedia

The Bardenas Reales is a semi-desert natural region, or badlands, of some 42,000 hectares in southeast Navarre (Spain). The soils are made up of clay, chalk, and sandstone and have been eroded by water and wind creating surprising shapes, canyons, plateaus, tabular structures, and isolated hills, called cabezos. Bardenas Reales lacks urban areas, vegetation is scarce and the many streams that cross the territory have a markedly seasonal flow, staying dry most of the year.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

42.19000, -1.50000per Wikidata