When people think about wildfire prevention, they usually imagine fire trucks, helicopters and emergency crews. For most of Mediterranean history, though, one of the most effective tools for reducing fire risk walked on four legs.
A few years ago, inspired by the Catalan initiative Ramats de Foc, we gave a small herd of goats a home, cleared our own and our neighbours’ land, and began helping maintain other properties too. We built a routine of grazing every evening in the hours before sunset, moving through abandoned areas, properties and paths — mostly a matter of observing where the work is most needed, and giving the plants time to recover in between.
It is not about romanticising the work — there is a lot of hard graft in it. It is more about our relationship with the place we live in. Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing on reciprocity, we have come to think of it this way: living well means giving back to the ecosystems that sustain us, rather than only extracting from them. Spending so much time outside with the animals has taught us a great deal about how we relate to non-human life, and reminded us that we are participants in the living world, not its masters.
A landscape built for grazing
Goats, sheep and donkeys were once essential to an actively managed Tramuntana landscape — not just a source of food, wool and income, but active land managers, properly cared for because they sustained life, not because they were passive assets. Moving across terraces, forest edges and mountain slopes, they consumed vegetation that would otherwise accumulate as combustible fuel, helping keep the mosaic landscape that defined the Serra de Tramuntana for centuries.
Much of that grazing has disappeared. As farming declined with the rise of tourism, rural populations shrank and grazing areas were abandoned. Shrubs expanded, young pine forest spread into old agricultural land, and vegetation grew denser — leaving far more continuous fuel than in the past. The consequences reach beyond fire risk: dense vegetation competes for scarce water, reduces habitat diversity, and in many places is crowding out the open ground that pollinators, birds and native plants depend on.
Reintroducing grazing is one of the most effective, natural ways to address these challenges. At Regenera Deià, Guerrilla Grazing explores how carefully managed animals can once again become partners in landscape regeneration.
This approach is being rediscovered across southern Europe, as conservationists, foresters and fire-prevention specialists relearn what rural communities once understood as a matter of course: animals can do ecological work that is difficult, expensive or simply impossible to replicate with machines. Guerrilla Grazing is about more than vegetation, too — if grazing becomes economically viable again, it can support local farmers, create new livelihoods, and strengthen the connection between communities and the landscapes they live in. Healthy landscapes need ongoing care, and that care has to be backed by a viable economy if it is to last.
Guerrilla grazing in the Deià municipality
ABOCA verds was born out of a sense of urgency: abandoned olive groves gradually turning into unmanaged, fire-prone pine forest, and a wish to do something about it — while, in the process, hopefully producing some good goat cheese along the way. While we wait for the goats to be ready to milk, we manage the overgrown understory of the pine forests on the western side of the municipality. A flock of Majorcan sheep, of the Ovella Roja Mallorquina breed, has since joined them, bringing its own grazing habits to complement the goats’.
We call it guerrilla grazing because it is carried out as occasional, spontaneous interventions, wherever and whenever they are most needed — intensively, in the plots alongside paths, streams and roads where wildfire risk runs highest. Done this way, grazing reduces the dense shrub layer in the forest understory, helps restore balance between vegetation layers and so supports biodiversity, lets grasslands recover instead of degrading through overgrazing, contributes to carbon sequestration, and helps prevent soil erosion and water evaporation. As a bonus, the animals disperse seeds, neatly packaged in their own fertiliser.
It is also, by our best-kept secret, work the animals themselves seem to enjoy — always on fresh vegetation, which improves their health and wellbeing, and reduces how much forage we need to bring in from elsewhere on the island, or from the mainland. Extensive, rotational grazing that respects animal welfare is becoming rare, as livestock farming gives way to intensive industrial production — and with it, the traditional knowledge, skills and rural culture that went with those professions is disappearing too. That is a big part of why we think it matters to bring this way of caring for the land back.
GPS collars
One of the newest tools in our guerrilla is invisible fencing. Our herds wear GPS collars, which let us set and move virtual grazing areas without building permanent fences — giving us the flexibility to respond quickly as conditions change, and to direct the herd precisely where the work is most needed, with minimal disturbance to the landscape. For us the collars are not a replacement for good shepherding, but another tool: they help us manage the land more effectively, improve animal welfare through adaptive grazing, and make this old practice viable again in the twenty-first century.
The collars also let us create exclusion zones within a grazing area — virtual boundaries that protect young trees, dry-stone terraces, sensitive habitats or anything else of ecological or cultural value, while the animals continue grazing freely around them. That precision makes conservation and grazing fully compatible, and lets us rotate several smaller herds across different parts of the municipality at once, targeting priority areas as conditions change through the year.
The goal is not to recreate the past exactly as it was — rural Mallorca today faces different realities and different opportunities. But many of the principles that made these landscapes resilient still hold: diversity, stewardship, active management. As climate change puts more pressure on Mediterranean ecosystems, solutions that work with nature rather than against it matter more, not less. The future resilience of Deià depends on this — on relearning that we are not the centre of the world, and that managing our ecosystem well means understanding ourselves as part of it: observing, and trying to live in a balance of giving and taking.
