I love the island of Cabrera, or should I rather say, the Parc nacional de l’arxipèlag de Cabrera. To protect this National Park, it was decided some years ago that no more than 200 visitors should be allowed to visit Cabrera on a daily basis. In 2008, a total of 72,000 persons visited the archipelago, thus reaching its declared limits. To stop an increase in numbers of visitors, the Spanish government decided to instead create a Centre d’Interpretació de Cabrera in Colònia de Sant Jordi, to inform and educate about history, flora and fauna of this Nature Park and its maritime zones. This information centre was built at great cost and inaugurated in the Summer of 2008. A visit has to be recommended. Admission is free, but rumour has it that a small fee will be charged from the beginning of 2010.

I have mixed feelings about the Centre d’Interpretació de Cabrera. I applaud the educational aim of the centre. There are large aquariums and small tanks of water installed in which fish and other water creatures and plants are kept in great variety, all of them indigenous to Cabrera. If you are interested in marine life but are not an expert you will, however, find no displays indicating which creatures or plants you are looking at. Yes, there are friendly personnel about that you can ask, even in one or the other foreign idiom, but after a while one tends to give up. Instead one wishes that there would be printed information available that one could look up, or that panels would be on display that one could consult.

The centre’s lack of information is even more in evidence once one wants to visit the large book shop. The tienda specialises in literature about this and other Spanish National Parks. However, the doors are closed for legal reasons, or so I was told. The centre is not allowed for some strange rationale to operate a book shop or to part with printed matter, guide books or otherwise.

In case you should seek information about Cabrera in addition to what little the Centre d’Interpretació has on offer, here is a link to a well made dbalears website on the subject, albeit in Catalan only. The extensive Galeria Virtual there is self-explanatory, though.

Molts gràcies, dbalears. Thank you very much.

The photo was taken in Colònia de Sant Jordi, Mallorca, Baleares, Spain. The date: August 20th, 2009. The time was 14:00:01.