Seven representatives from Spain’s Directorate-General for Biodiversity, part of the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO), recently participated in a landscape visit hosted by FIRE and Commonland in the Campo de Montiel landscape (Castilla – La Mancha) one of the key landscapes in La Red de Territorios Regenerativos (The Network of Regenerative Territories).
The delegation is responsible for drafting Spain’s National Nature Restoration Plan, and the visit was a first step in building a relationship between the network and the national government on restoration policy.
The goal was straightforward: to show evidence that holistic landscape restoration works. The day consisted of a field visit, starting at Navalab, an experimental farm where FIRE’s agroecological and forestry restoration practices are put into practice and tested. The delegation saw the methods on the ground, the challenges of applying them, and the results so far.
From there, the group visited a sheep farm and cheese dairy, where the owner explained her shift a year ago from a traditional model to holistic management. The conversation focused on what drove that change, the difficulty of doing things differently, and a point we often see in landscape work: restoration is most sustainable if there is a business case behind it.
Four themes ran through the day’s discussions:
Restoration as a grassroots movement: The delegation wanted to understand how a social movement of landowners, farmers, and entrepreneurs is built from the ground up.
Private finance for restoration: MITECO has a public budget for the National Plan but will need to mobilise private capital alongside it—credits, investment, and donations.
Evidence from other landscapes: The delegation was invited to visit further sites, including the Ebro Delta, later this year, and will assess their capacity to do so.
A route into the Plan: The delegation flagged that organisations like FIRE proposing restoration measures and indicators to regional governments— in this case, Castilla-La Mancha, who then forward them nationally – is the most direct way for on-the-groundwork to shape the National Plan.
The visit also opened a conversation about MITECO’s potential future involvement in the Landscape Leadership Labs, part of Commonland’s work in Iberia.
For La Red, a national government taking time to see restoration on the ground and asking how to fund and formalise more of it is a sign that the political context around restoration is changing. The movement is growing. Visits like these are not only validation of good work but a concrete step toward making landscapes the national priority they always should have been.
About FIRE
FIRE, or the International Foundation for Ecosystem Restoration, works to restore ecosystems through education and research — forging links with academic groups, businesses, organisations and the public, and putting into practice and refining ecosystem restoration techniques.
About La Red de Territorios Regenerativos
La Red is a network of regenerative territories and landscape initiatives across Iberia in Spain and Portugal. The network connects farmers, consumers, landowners and governing bodies to create a thriving Iberian bioregion, where communities lead; ecosystems flourish, and the interconnection between nature, society, and economy is re-established. Commonland, along with a constellation of other initiatives, is a strategic and founding partner of La Red.
More information about the network and its partners can be found on the La Red website here.