What happened to the eggs at El Chorro?

To understand what happened, we need to look back at the 19th century, a time when numerous British people, such as soldier William Willoughby Cole Verner, decided to study the natural environments in different countries. Verner, in particular, spent a great deal of his life in southern Spain, collating information for his numerous works, which included 'My life among wild birds in Spain' (1905).

This passionate conservationist took many British people and those of other nationalities to plunder live birds and eggs, and in many cases they were assisted by local experts. It has not been proven that this continual activity during decades was the cause of the disappearance of several species at El Chorro, but it is highly probable that they were linked.

Saturnino Moreno, who has recently retired as the head of the Malaga regional government's environmental programmes, says lammergeier eggs are on display in at least 13 museums around the world. One of them, taken from the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes gorge (below the Caminito del Rey) is at the Alexandre Köening museum in Germany. There is another example from El Chorro in the same museum, which was collected in January 1889.

Maintaining diversity

Visitors to the National Museum in London will find another lammergeier egg, which was picked up in the Sierra de Cornicabra, behind the Mesas de Villaverde at El Chorro.

Moreno points out that local people used to help the experts who wanted to reach the nests, which was surprising considering that the explorers believed the only way of conserving the species was to remove them from the area, because they didn't think the locals were capable of looking after them.

This paradox is the reason that lammergeiers no longer fly over the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes gorge (the last reference to one was in 1921, by the Duke of Medinaceli, a keen hunter, in his memoirs). It is likely that this solitary bird will never return to what used to be its home.