Iberian Lynx – Will We See It or Not?

With the Iberian lynx, things worked out for my Czech Photo Travel clients at the beginning of January, but it was always by the skin of our teeth. The encounters in the hides were brief, either very early in the morning or very late in the evening. And as if that wasn’t enough, visibility in the mountains was reduced to barely 10–20 metres by fog and low cloud. You simply can’t look for camouflaged cats in conditions like that.

We spent two days among moss-covered boulders and cork oaks, scanning every corner we could see through our binoculars, but nothing. During those days, along those ten traditional kilometres of observation sites, none of the people we encountered with binoculars, spotting scopes or thermal imaging had seen a lynx either.

The Iberian lynx above Andújar was finally spotted the following day, but by then we were already among the rocks with Spanish ibex. The evening light at sunset was fantastic with them. But once again, the morning brought winds strong enough to knock us over, and visibility was less than ten metres. I was the only one who briefly got out of the car before declaring that it made no sense. I wasn’t going to risk one of the photographers slipping off a cliff in those conditions and ending up in Villanueva de la Concepción…

The important thing, though, was that by the time everyone was sitting on the plane back from Málaga, they were happy. Nobody can take those experiences away from them, and the memory cards were full of photographs of the dream species of Andalusia.

I’ve arranged the next group trip to photograph Iberian lynx in Andalusia for 6–11 December 2025. I’ve been there twice in December, and I find it better than January.

Related links
My first (2020), second (2021) and third (2022) Iberian lynx trips
Wildlife photography articles
Iberian lynx photographs on Shutterstock
Photography workshops
Photography trips and tours