The remaining tiger within the Peña Escrita mountain park was drugged and sent on its way to Alicante this afternoon, to its new home.

We say ‘remaining’ tiger, as you can see from this photo that we took several years ago in the park, there were in fact three Bengali tigers once upon a time.

A veterinary team, accompanied by the Councillor for the Environment, Luís Aragón, helped get Nerea, as the big cat is known, out of the cage (suitably anaesthetised) and into a transport cage using a sort of stretcher.

Now the lonesome bear only has an oryx and two emus for company… but not for long as they will be moved down to Almuñécar to the bird park, Parque Loro Sexi.

Any reader knows that it is hard enough to find a home for a litter of pups or kittens, let alone a hippo, several tigers, a bear, a white lion, a camel and god knows how many more exotic animals that once lived in the park, but since 2015, that is what they have been doing.

The idea is to turn the mountain park into a home for the local fauna, such as deer, mountain goats, perhaps even the Iberian wolf, so that it will be a nature reserve, rather than the hotchpotch zoo that it morphed into.

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