ANDÚJAR, Spain — In 2002, the Iberian lynx was 94 animals in two patches of scrub in southern Spain, and the question among biologists was not whether it would disappear but when. On Monday, the Spanish and Portuguese governments announced the results of this year’s census: 2,834 lynx, spread across 14 populations, from the Algarve to the hills north of Madrid.
The count, which combines camera traps, radio collars, and track surveys, is up 18 percent on last year and 30-fold on the low point. It makes the Iberian lynx the most successful large carnivore recovery in Europe and, by the reckoning of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which downgraded the species from endangered to vulnerable in 2024, one of the most successful anywhere.
“People ask what the secret was. The secret was that there was no secret. It was rabbits, roads, and 25 years of not giving up,” said Carmen Ruiz-Tejada, who coordinates the recovery program from a field station in the Sierra de Andújar, where the first captive-bred animals were released in 2010.
The lynx eats almost nothing but rabbits, and the collapse of rabbit populations from two introduced viruses was the main cause of its decline. The recovery program has spent as much on rabbits as on cats: fencing and restocking warrens, planting pasture, and persuading landowners that a lynx on the property is an asset. Captive breeding centers in Spain and Portugal have released 420 animals since 2010; the rest of the population was born wild.
The remaining threat is asphalt. Roughly 10 percent of the population is killed on roads each year, 290 animals in 2025, and as the lynx spreads from protected reserves into farmland and the outskirts of towns, the toll rises. “A lynx does not know where the park ends,” said Rui Teixeira, who leads the Portuguese side of the program in the Guadiana valley. “Every new population we celebrate is a new road we have to fence.”
Attitudes among landowners have shifted with the numbers. Joaquín Berlanga, who runs a hunting estate near Andújar, said his father had considered the lynx a competitor for game. “Now I have eight on the land and I show them to clients. They pay more to see a lynx than to shoot a deer,” he said. “My father would not have believed either part of that sentence.”
Ms. Ruiz-Tejada said the program’s goal was 5,000 animals by 2040, the number at which the species could be considered safe from a single disease or disaster. “We have done the hard part, which was the first 1,000,” she said. “Now we have to do the boring part, which is the next 2,000 and every road between them.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 5 of the European edition with the headline: The Iberian Lynx, Once Down to 94 Animals, Now Numbers More Than 2,800.
