Asturias, Spain: I visit a farm that is thrilling in its ecological abundance, created in just eight years
On a rocky 13-hectare pocket in the foothills of the Picos de Europa, Luke Massey and Katie Stacey are raising children, dogs, cattle, chicken, ducks, geese and eyebrows. In their eight years here, the farm they call Wild Finca has become a mass of scrub, with scattered large trees and dozens of clearings that Luke calls fields, but which look more like tiny irregular glades, riddled with trails and hemmed all around by the blackthorn, gorse and bramble that has sprung up around the tumbled remains of drystone walls.
If Wild Finca is a forever home to the Massey-Staceys, it is a whole world to nature. Witness the butterflies and wasp spiders, the snakes, lizards, hedgehogs and sparrows, and the thousand-piece cricket orchestra that performs each evening as the glow-worms light up. It offers denning and roosting sites for foxes, pine martens, badgers and 17 species of bat, feeding opportunities for roe deer and wild boar, several species of eagle and vulture, and a pit stop for others such as the nightingale I heard singing in early morning mist.
