CHAPTER IV 
THE COTO DONANA 
NOTES ON ITS PHYSICAL FORMATION, FAUNA, AND RED DEER 
THE great river Guadalquivir, divid- 
ing in its oblique course seawards 
into double channels and finally 
swerving, as though reluctant to lose 
all identity in the infinite Atlantic, 
practically cuts off from the Spanish 
mainland a triangular region, some 
forty miles of waste and wilderness, 
an isolated desert, singular as it is 
beautiful, which we now endeavour 
to describe. This, from our having for many years held the 
rights of chase, we can at least undertake with knowledge and 
affection. 
Its precise geological formation ’twere beyond our power, 
unskilled in that science, to diagnose. But even to untaught 
eye, the existence of the whole area is obviously due to an age- 
long conflict waged between two Powers—the great river from 
within, the greater ocean without. The Guadalquivir, draining 
the distant mountains of Moréna and full 200 miles of intervening 
plain, rolls down a tawny flood charged with yellow mud till its 
colour resembles café au lait. Thus proceeds a ceaseless deposit 
of sediment upon the sea-bed; but the external Power forcibly 
opposes such infringement of its area. Here the elemental battle 
is joined. The river has so far prevailed as to have grabbed 
from the sea many hundred square miles of alluvial plain, that 
known as the marisma; but at this precise epoch, the Sea- 
Power appears to have called checkmate by interposing a vast 
barrier of sand along the whole battle-front. The net result 
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