Spain Geography, Climate & Nature

Spain occupies most of the Iberian Peninsula and is framed by mountains on nearly every side — the Pyrenees along the French border, the Cantabrian range across the north, and the Sierra Nevada and other ranges crossing the interior and south. It holds the southernmost point of continental Europe.

The interior is the Meseta Central, a vast high plateau that gives Madrid a markedly more continental climate than the coasts. The coastline changes character completely around the country: the Atlantic-facing north is green and rainy, the Mediterranean south dry and sunny.

Beyond the mainland, Spanish territory includes the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean, the volcanic Canary Islands in the eastern Atlantic, and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla in mainland Africa. Teide, on Tenerife, is the highest point in Spain at 3,715 metres and the highest of any island in the Atlantic Ocean; measured from its base on the ocean floor it reaches 7,500 metres, which UNESCO and NASA rank as the third-tallest volcanic structure on Earth. It is an active volcano — its most recent eruption was in late 1909 — and its proximity to towns including Garachico, Icod de los Vinos and Puerto de la Cruz is why it is monitored as closely as it is.

The longest uninterrupted border inside the European Union is the 1,214-kilometre one between Spain and Portugal.

Spain's climate varies sharply by region and the variation is a planning problem rather than a detail. The Mediterranean coast and the south are hot and dry in summer with mild winters; the interior Meseta around Madrid has a far more extreme continental climate, with real cold in winter.

The northern "Green Spain" coast, from Galicia to the Basque Country, has an oceanic climate much closer to Ireland or the UK than to the rest of the country — green because it rains, which is the trade-off.

The Canary Islands hold a stable, mild, spring-like climate nearly all year, which makes them Europe's most reliable winter-sun destination.

Heat and fire are the summer constraints

Inland summer temperatures regularly exceed 40°C — Seville and Córdoba routinely — and extreme weather affects many parts of Spain over the summer months; the Spanish Meteorological Office, AEMET, publishes the warnings. Wildfires happen often, including on the islands, through the summer. Causing a wildfire is a criminal offence in Spain even if unintentional: extinguish cigarette ends properly, do not light barbecues in forest areas, where the fines are heavy, and do not leave empty bottles behind. Flash flooding is the other extreme, and can disrupt travel and damage infrastructure.

Spain holds more habitat variety than any other country in western Europe, for the same reason its climate is so uneven: it runs from Atlantic oceanic in the north-west through a high continental plateau to genuinely semi-arid country in the south-east, and then jumps to subtropical Atlantic islands 1,000 kilometres offshore. The Pyrenees, the Cantabrian range and the Sierra Nevada each hold their own montane systems, and the Strait of Gibraltar puts the whole country on the main migration corridor between Europe and Africa.

Doñana, on the Atlantic coast of Andalusia, is the internationally important one, and it is important precisely because of where it sits. Its position between Europe and Africa and its proximity to the Strait make its salt marshes both a breeding ground and a transit point for thousands of European and African birds, and over 300 species may be recorded there annually. It was declared a World Heritage Site in 1994. The park holds fallow deer, Spanish red deer, wild boar, European badgers and Egyptian mongooses alongside the birds.

The Canary Islands are the other distinct system: volcanic, oceanic, and biologically separate from the mainland. Teide sits inside the Las Cañadas caldera at about 2,190 metres, the remains of an older eroded volcano, and the altitude range from sea level to 3,715 metres compresses several climate zones into one island.

Practically, the two things worth planning around are the migration seasons in the south-west and the altitude in the mountains and on Tenerife. Spain's wildlife is not concentrated where its visitors are, which is why so little of it is seen by them.

The Iberian lynx is the conservation story of European wildlife, and it is a Spanish one. By the turn of the 21st century it was on the verge of extinction: only 94 individuals survived in two isolated subpopulations in Andalusia in 2002, down from 15 subpopulations in the 1940s. The collapse came from overhunting, poaching, habitat fragmentation and the crash of its main prey, the European rabbit, through myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease. Habitat improvement, restocking rabbits, translocation, reintroduction and monitoring took the population from a low of 326 in 2012 to some 2,021 by 2024, and the IUCN reclassified it from endangered to vulnerable. Doñana and the Sierra Morena are where it lives.

The Iberian wolf is the largest wolf population in western Europe, with 2,200 to 2,700 animals in north-western Spain and northern Portugal. It was the only western European wolf whose hunting remained legal until Spain banned it in February 2021; in March 2025 the Congress approved hunting again north of the Douro, after population growth and rising livestock losses. That reversal is the whole argument about European rewilding in one country, and it is live.

The birds are the reliable sighting. Doñana records over 300 species a year and holds the Spanish imperial eagle; the Strait of Gibraltar is one of the great raptor migration bottlenecks in the world; and the mountains hold griffon and bearded vultures.

Practically: the lynx is seen by patient people in the Sierra Morena in winter, the wolf almost never, and the birds by anyone who turns up at Doñana or Tarifa in migration season. Nothing here is a safari, and a guide is the difference between a list and a walk.