destruction of Mijas’s green spaces « Euro Weekly News
Freshly turned soil, snapped irrigation pipes, and torn up flowerbeds. Gardeners working their socks off just to keep up. The culprit is the often talked about four-legged one with a taste for damp earth.
€210,000 bill and still counting
Mijas town hall’s Parks and Gardens Department has spent more than €210,000 since the start of the year repairing, replanting and staffing efforts across the towns public green spaces, all because of the growing wild boar population. Councillor Daniel Gomez confirmed the figure this week, explaining that these animals raid gardens in search of food night after night, forcing crews to intervene daily with materials and manpower to put things right.
Sixteen gardeners, one relentless job
Four gardeners cover Mijas Pueblo, another four work in La Cala, and eight are stationed in Las Lagunas, deployed every day to assess and repair whatever the boars have left behind overnight, with additional weekend guard shifts in place. Plants, substrate, irrigation components, water usage and labour make up the bulk of that six-figure spend.
Damage is fairly evenly spread across all three of Mijas’s population centres, though certain urban pockets have suffered particularly badly, among them the area around La Cala’s cultural centre, Calazul, Doña Ermita, the gardens by San Manuel church, El Compas and La Muralla.
Feasting on flowerbeds
Freshly dug, moisture-rich flowerbeds are irresistible to these animals, who root through soil in search of food and water. Lawns get torn apart as they hunt for irrigation pipes, breaking them open to drink from, resulting in flooding, burst pipes and ruined plantings. Large hollows left by their digging often refill with leaking water before repair crews even get the chance to fix them.
Several factors make the problem worse: short gestation periods of around four months, frequent multiple births, no natural predators in the area, and over a million square metres of public gardens across Mijas for the animals to roam.
