African swine fever (ASF) has reached Barcelona. A new positive case of a wild boar infected with the virus has been detected within the Barcelona municipality, as reported this afternoon by the Catalan Minister of Agriculture, Òscar Ordeig, who indicated that this new case will appear in tomorrow's official count by the Ministry of Agriculture. This latest positive result has prompted heightened precautions in the Collserola mountain range, where the closure of the natural park has been reinforced, as reported earlier today by the online newspaper. NationOrdeig explained that a resolution will be issued tomorrow to extend access restrictions to the natural environment, specifically expanding them to the entire Collserola Natural Park. "We are continuing with the containment strategy for the epicenter and the entire Collserola area; as you know, closing the entire natural park is impossible," the minister admitted, "but we are implementing a containment strategy and also reinforcing our resources with captures," he continued. The minister detailed that they met this morning with the municipalities affected by the natural park's entry into the highest-risk zone, as well as with the park's consortium, and that the resolution will be made public tomorrow, Thursday. The Minister of Agriculture again asked for patience and insisted that "the solution will not be short-term under any circumstances." Ordeig explained that containing the virus in this area is easier because it borders the Mediterranean Sea on one side, but, conversely, "there is a difficulty" because it is all happening in a densely populated urban area full of businesses, making perimeter closures difficult.

The Central Veterinary Laboratory in Algete (Madrid) has confirmed that 10 more wild boars have tested positive for African swine fever (ASF). All of them were found in the vicinity of Collserola Park, within the municipality of Cerdanyola del Vallès, as were all the other specimens in which the presence of the pathogen has been confirmed. Including these 10 confirmed cases from Tuesday, the total number of wild boars that have died from ASF in the highest-risk area is now 26. The other 208 carcasses analyzed tested negative for ASF, according to a statement from the Ministry of Agriculture. The Catalan Minister of Agriculture, Òscar Ordeig, stated that the detection of these 10 new positive cases "is within the realm of normality," given that the search for wild boars in the virus-affected area has been intensified in recent days. "It's normal for them to keep appearing; ideally, they should be contained," he said after explaining that all the cases were found within the same 6-kilometer radius. "This was already expected. In fact, the real news would be if no more cases appeared," Ordeig said at a press conference from the Palau de la Generalitat, where he ruled out increasing restrictions on access to the natural environment as a result of these new cases.

"Wild boars don't understand borders." These are the words of an environmental technician from a municipality in the Baix Llobregat region, which perfectly summarize the problems local councils face in controlling wildlife. All of this has gained prominence in the wake of the crisis. due to the outbreak of African swine feverBut for months—and in some cases, years—metropolitan municipalities with nearby mountains have been rolling up their sleeves to keep these wild boars under control. The problem arises when, outside of natural parks, the option chosen by one municipality affects the situation of another: either because it opts for hunting, which causes the wild boars—very sensitive to noise—to move to another area, or because it does nothing to control them. It's a scenario that turns municipal management of wild boar control into a veritable arena for game theory. This dilemma occurs, for example, in Sant Climent and the villages surrounding Sant Ramon mountain. The village's hunting society regularly conducts wild boar hunts within the municipal boundaries, which are entirely a hunting area. However, the city council warns that these efforts are "insufficient if neighboring municipalities do not implement similar measures" or if hunting is restricted in nearby areas—as is the case in so-called safety zones. This is the case, for example, in Sant Boi de Llobregat, where the standard control method is capture with cages followed by anesthesia by a veterinarian, and in Viladecans, where they are in the process of hiring a specialized company to do the same following incidents that occurred in the town center last autumn.

It's raining on already soaked ground for the Catalan livestock sector. Barely two months after the First cases of contagious nodular dermatosis that put cattle farms throughout Catalonia on alertAn outbreak of African swine fever in the wildlife of Collserola has triggered alarms, now on the country's pig farms. Pig farming is the main activity in the sector, with almost 8 million head of livestock and more than 5,000 farms, ranging from large-scale operations to small and medium-sized producers, especially in Lleida, Central Catalonia, Garrotxa, and Selva. This economic engine, beyond the farms themselves, employs thousands of workers, from feed production to marketing, including transportation, machinery manufacturing, slaughterhouses, and meat processing plants. On the first working Monday after the outbreak, the volume of work in the sector remains relatively normal, but the atmosphere is tense due to fear and uncertainty about how the disease will evolve. Within a 20 km radius of the outbreak, where there are about thirty small farms, the movement of pigs in and out is restricted. Outside the restricted radius, but very close to the border, Oriol Rovira Costa, from Lluçanès, has a piglet farm with 300 sows that produce about 8,000 pigs a year: "We don't know what will happen. We understand that if we used to export 20% within Spain and now we can't," he explains. The official statement from the slaughterhouses is that no significant changes are expected in the slaughter forecasts this week, although local producers claim that their first orders were canceled today. "We hope that the government and the large companies that dominate the market will restructure so that the supply chain can continue. On the farms, I have batches every 15 days: I can't tell the sows not to breed when I inseminated them 100 days ago," Rovira adds.

People are photographing and recording the scene. In the courtyard of a convent in the upper part of Barcelona, ​​a large wild boar is running up and down. The witness who describes it says it's as big "as a cow." The building is closed, and the animal is exploring its gardens. Behind it, four police officers are trying to guide it toward a net they had set up, but it has escaped. The boar has run toward the mountain, back toward Collserola. This scene is not new in the Barcelona neighborhoods bordering Tibidabo—it's more frequent—but the outbreak of African swine fever detected not far from there means that the presence of wild boars is being noticed more than ever by the public.

The Minister of Agriculture, Òscar Ordeig, confirmed this Monday that only two cases have been detected so far. positive cases of African swine fever In Catalonia, but raised the number of suspected cases to eight and predicted that more positive results would "surely" emerge. The regional minister stated that it is still "too early" to determine the origin of the virus outbreak, although he indicated that the most likely scenario is that it arrived via contaminated food remains. In a press conference at midday on Monday, Ordeig explained that, for the moment, only two cases of infected wild boar have been confirmed. The first two were detected in Cerdanyola del Vallès last week, which prompted the Ministry of Agriculture to suspend all export licenses for wild boar meat to other countries. Aside from these two cases, the laboratory of the Animal Health Research Center (IRTA-CRESA) of the Catalan government has analyzed approximately forty more wild boar found in the area, of which about eight are suspected of having the disease.

The Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, and Food, Òscar Ordeig, confirmed this Sunday that the African swine fever virus has not reached any of the farms surrounding the area where infected wild boars were found. "We confirm that we are talking about positive cases in wild boars and that it has not reached any farms," he said at a press conference in Lleida. So far, the positive and suspected cases detected are in wild boars, and they have been found in the municipality of Cerdanyola del Vallès, next to the Collserola Park, where some 900 wild boars live. Tests carried out on the 39 farms within a six-kilometer radius of the area where the sick animals were found have ruled out the presence of the virus in any farmed pigs. Nevertheless, Ordeig called on livestock farmers to take extreme biosecurity precautions, paying particular attention to farm fences and monitoring entry and exit points to prevent the spread of the outbreak, the first in the country since 1994. Ordeig, who noted that the characteristics of the area where the violations have been found—"limited by a lot of infrastructure, a lot of roads"—are helping to control the virus, also asked the public to respect the mobility restrictions in Collserola Park. He warned that those who do not comply will face fines and that the police will have "zero tolerance" for non-compliance. "We are in a health crisis," he said. Ordeig argued that controlling cases of African swine fever "is not just a matter for livestock farmers and the food sector, but also a national issue; it must be done well and quickly, allocating all the necessary resources."

Researchers at the Animal Health Research Center (IRTA-CReSA) are sequencing and isolating the virus detected in wild boars that died in the Collserola Natural Park after being infected with African swine fever. They are searching for the virus's genome to compare it with those circulating in other countries and pinpoint its origin. Francesc Accensi, an IRTA-CReSA researcher and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), explained to ARA that the most likely scenario is that an animal came into contact with contaminated food or material transported by a human. However, he cautioned, "We may always be left wondering how it got here. Once we have the sequence, we can see where it came from and determine if it closely resembles the virus circulating in Italy, Poland, Germany, Romania, Russia, or China. But we won't know exactly how it arrived, whether it was on tires." If it were in food, remember that this would have affected wild boar, but not humans or other animal species.

Forest management in our country's forests has historically been a challenge, but with each passing year, the failure to embrace this challenge (in all its complexity) becomes more and more dangerous. We are reminded of this by the two major fires experienced so far this summer, in Ponent and in Baix Ebre, where at times the flames were so massive that firefighters' resources were insufficient to extinguish them. The reality is that these types of fires, known as sixth-generation fires, put us even more in a hurry to take landscape management as seriously as we do extinguishing any fire that breaks out (like the one this Sunday in Mont-ras).

The forest management of our country's forests is a livelier debate than ever. The serious and voracious fire in Ponent at the beginning of July had characteristics of the dreaded sixth-generation fires. Under extreme conditions, a small spark can ignite a massive blaze that devastates everything in a matter of hours. And one of the most vulnerable areas is Collserola, declared a natural park in 2010. Located in the middle of the densely populated metropolitan area of Barcelona, it receives nearly 5.2 million visitors each year, has experienced the abandonment of its forests for decades, and is now suffering the effects of the climate crisis. These complex characteristics have turned this green lung into a powder keg. Furthermore, 60% of the land is private and 40% public, which adds to the difficulty of managing the park.

The heat was beginning to reach the houses on the slopes of Collserola, and a neighbor, looking for some fresh air, opened her windows. Suddenly, she heard a loud bang echoing through the ravine in front of her house. It was just a few minutes after eleven at night and she saw an unmarked van close its trunk doors and accelerate down Calle Manuel Arnús. Once again, an organized group had dumped a handful of used tires in the Collserola Natural Park.