A coastal location brings a typically Mediterranean climate: rains in spring and fall, infrequent but torrential, and mild temperatures; temperate winters and hot, dry summers. The landscape in both the Olèrdola Park and the Garraf Nature Reserve is characterized by its Mediterranean nature and by being witness to a long relationship between man and his environment.
These two areas are legally protected by the Barcelona City Council’s special protection plans, the one for Garraf definitively approved by the Catalonian Generalitat in 1986, and the one for Olèrdola in 1992.
A large part of Garraf offers us a southern Mediterranean landscape. The vegetation that characterizes this landscape is a dense, three-meter tall shrub land where the kermes oak and mastic trees prevail and where the European Fan Palm, Mauritanian grass and other species of African origin also grow.
Further inland, the landscape is dotted with Holm oak groves and Aleppo pine groves, most of which have been affected by forest fires and today are going through a regeneration process.
In the fondos (basins) or closed valleys, we find the typical evergreen oak woodland vegetation, like the evergreen oak itself, European box, wild madder, Etruscan honeysuckle or Laurestine.
Regarding fauna, animal species include the Montpellier snake, the horseshoe whip snake,
the black wheatear, the black-eared wheatear, the blue rock-thrush, the stone marten and the Eurasian badger. The Mediterranean tortoise has also recently been introduced.
Ponds are key spots in the lives of many different species, especially those whose life cycle is irrefutably tied to water, like amphibians and many invertebrates.
The highly developed Karstic system has encouraged the presence of cave-dwelling animals, some of which are the only kind of their species in the world.
Phisical Enviroment, Vegetation and Fauna
