The present Town Council in Almuñécar has been working diligently at whittling down the number of wild animals up in the Peña Escrita mountain park by finding new homes for them.

So far the hyenas and wolves have gone to a zoo in Sevilla, the camel will end up in Jerez and the monkeys in Valencia. However, nobody wants the hippo or the bears.

Now the decision to do this was not on a whim, but rather a judicial necessity because the park doesn’t have, nor ever had a zoo licence, mainly because it is totally inadequate in terms of requirements.

Quite apart from that, when Mayor Trinidad Herrera took office, right in the middle of the crisis, she found that she had 150 animals, many of them wild, costing the town-hall coffers some 300,000 euros a year… just in food.

The only income was the restaurant lease and the wooden cabins, which can house 48 tourists. Anybody who has taken on the restaurant lease has gone bust and the cabins have been closed down because regional laws have been updated and you simply can’t have accommodation next to bears, tigers, lions and wolves, without spending money that you don’t have to carry out the necessary changes.

There was an automatic barrier on the track but has long since broken down and there is no money to fix it, so no entrance fee can be charged.

Answer: get rid of the animals.

So what do you do with the installations once they have gone? Well one idea is to turn it over to animal-refuge associations to house their charges. Failing that, with the wild animals gone, the cabins can open again and can be leased out.

(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)