Echoes of pre-Famine times in Spanish countryside

WHAT wildlife would Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza have encountered on their famous foray all those years ago, asks Richard Collins

Francolins and pheasants are mentioned in Cervantes’ great novel.

Wolves were common in his day, brown bears lived in the forests but neither Cervantes nor the Don would have twitched the elusive Iberian lynx, now Europe’s rarest mammal.