Archipielago de Cabrera sea-land National Park

Cabrera has a semi-arid Mediterranean climate, with an average temperature of 17º C, very hot and dry summers and mild winters with little rainfall. The average rainfall is 334 mm. per year.

The island of Cabrera is an emerged relief, a continuation of the Serra de Levante in Mallorca: some thirty-five million years ago, in the Oligocene, the movement of the European and African continental plates gave rise to the great Betic mountain range, of which Cabrera, Mallorca and the Pitiusas islands formed part.

After the last glacial period, the ice melted, the Mediterranean regained its level and Cabrera was isolated from Mallorca some 12,000 years ago.

The soft, nutrient-rich Quaternary materials, good for agriculture, are scarce, which has historically led to low population levels.

The underwater meadows

When we dive for the first time into the waters of Cabrera, we are powerfully struck by its clarity. We seem to be flying, weightless, over the Posidonia meadows (Posidonia oceanica), a seaweed that is not a seaweed at all, but a higher plant, with roots and flowers, endemic to the Mediterranean, and of exceptional ecological importance. Its stems are home to a large number of creatures: fish such as the chopa (Spondyliosoma cantharus), the cow bream (Serranus scriba), the sea bream (Sparus aurata), the dentex (Dentex dentex), the voracious sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax), the salpa or salema (Sarpa salpa), with golden reflections, which feeds on the leaves of the posidonia in groups or shoals of up to hundreds of individuals, authentic underwater flocks, sea urchins, cuttlefish and, with a bit of luck, we will find the nacre (Pinna nobilis), an enormous bivalve mollusc, which has its hiding place here.

The rocky bottoms

Rocky bottoms are the underwater habitats that offer the greatest splendour and diversity, providing shelter and food for the fauna.

This is the home of the groupers (Epinephelus guaza), large and good-natured fish, the scorpion fish (Scorpaena spp.), with their venomous spines, masters of camouflage, the octopus (Octopus vulgaris), a very curious and intelligent animal, the moray eels (Muraena helena), the conger eels (Conger conger), etc., all of them dwellers of caves and nooks and crannies. Here we will see numerous invertebrates: periwinkles, sea acorns, crabs, holothurians, stars, etc. On the rock grows a similar number of algae, from the delicate, umbrella-shaped Acetabularia to the hard calcareous algae, which form the support for the coralligenous.

The coasts of Cabrera are not lacking in larger animals, such as the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), the striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba), the common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta).