El espectáculo de la conservación. El Parque Nacional de Doñana en El Hombre y la Tierra (1979)

By the end of the 1970s, four documentaries about Doñana National Park were broadcast within the National Spanish Television series Man and the Earth, directed by Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. Through the account of the Park’s life cycle –each chapter matched each one of the year’s seasons–, these chapters were a celebration of the struggle to conserve the natural heritage, whose meaning was established in relation to a beautifully-produced representation of both nature and the natural sciences. This paper analyzes how, in a quite complex historical and political context, and through the spectacle of the success and fragility of Doñana National Park, Rodríguez de la Fuente represented sensitivity towards nature and the natural heritage, acquired through the study of the natural sciences, as a key element of modernization.