ItInsightsWorld General Feature: Hornet Queens, Village Memory and Climate Pressure in Green Spain

The opening visual for this ItInsightsWorld general feature is Dan Joe's Hands, credited to William Bock and drawn from the Dinnseanchas Project.

The caption supplies the context: “Over the course of a year, I met with farmers and community members in the West Cork hills who have lived through dramatic changes in their lifetime; from the electrification of rural Ireland to radical shifts in farming practices and land management.”

From an Irish childhood, the narrator knows hills that have been pressed into a low silhouette against the horizon. Where trees were removed, or replaced by industrial conifer plantations, acidified soil means the land is unlikely to recover its earlier height each year. Wolves, bears and other megafauna that found shelter there centuries ago were destroyed long ago.

The view from the kitchen window now differs. There is a green mountain that thrusts upward, its summit scored against jagged limestone. The tallest mountain in Ireland is just over one thousand metres, while the peak seen while morning tea is made is higher than that. A little farther east, some summits stand above two and a half thousand metres. In those heights, Cantabrian brown bears move through the hills and sometimes come into the village in autumn to look for fruit. Wolves pass through the same terrain with ghostlike silence.

Mountains are not a scenic backdrop

This report, for ItInsightsWorld's General column, treats mountains as agents rather than as scenery. They are not merely romantic places where urban travellers and Western nature writers chase self-realisation. Their natural topography shelters enormous diversity—ecological, cultural and beyond. They are not a backdrop for human activity, nor a “landscape” to be visited; they shape experience itself. In some cultures they are ancient gods, and the reason is plain. They are also shadowed spaces for surveillance and the state.

Local pride in resisting conquest is carried in a joke: “Asturias es España, y lo demás tierra conquistada.” Its English version is straightforward: “Asturias is Spain, the rest is just conquered territory.” There is historical truth behind it, given struggles against the Romans and the Moors. These mountains are wild, unconquerable, resilient and difficult to govern. The people who have lived here over millennia tend to share that character.

Zomia, the conceyu and the rebellion of 1934

That mountain tenacity repeats around the world. James Scott, in The Art of Not Being Governed, used the experiences of 100 million residents of the high-altitude Zomia region in southeast Asia, an area geographically the size of Europe and historically outside lowland government control. Though dismissed as primitive or backwards, these mountain communities were fugitives from Progress, escaping taxes, conscription, epidemics, inequality and exploitation brought by modern government.

A comparable account for northern Spain's mountain communities could begin with the conceyu, an assembly and form of municipal self-rule that governed communal pasture, collective mills and ovens until the 19th century. It could then move into the 20th century, when, in 1934, Asturian mountain villages and mining towns became the epicentre of an armed working-class rebellion, a prelude to the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Remote hamlets and caves sheltered fugitive rebels, huidos, who faced execution.

Looking for a climate refuge in Green Spain

The narrator and his wife reached Green Spain knowing little of that history, looking instead for a climate refuge. The imposing mountain barrier separating the northern autonomous communities (Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country) from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula creates a uniquely damp and warm climate. Beyond the literal move into an unfamiliar high-altitude landscape, life there completes a metaphorical journey to the Mountain: a decade and a half of dreaming. It brought a rural stone cottage, a small garden large enough for basics, a lemon tree heavy with fruit, an apple tree, and a setting that might earn John Seymour's approval.

Wildfire, drought, and a hornet invasion

In their second summer, apocalyptic conditions arrived. Wildfires darkened the sky for days, summer temperatures rose to unprecedented levels, and the green mountain landscape turned yellow. Drought dried up springs that had run uninterrupted for centuries. The fire service helicopter scooped what water it could from the local river while trying to contain vast lines of fire across the valleys.

Eventually, even holm oaks clinging to the karst mountain, usually resilient and accustomed to water scarcity, began to die en masse. Their carcasses made the landscape more vulnerable to wildfires, and the downward spiral continues. There is no real escape from the damage wrought by civilisation.

The Asian hornet, Vespa velutina, known locally as la velutina, has also gained a foothold over the last decade, arriving, as the story goes, incognito in a shipment of pottery from China. It hunts local insects aggressively and has disrupted honey production at lower altitudes. The dream of keeping bees is on hold. By late summer, when enormous hives have matured and the hornets gorge on fermenting fallen fruit, one can walk through the landscape and wonder whether other insects remain. Milder winters and scorching summers help the hornets spread; the problems of modernity multiply, feeding upon each other.

A trapping routine measured in queens

To confront the plague, the local council organises an annual selective trapping campaign in spring. It seeks to tackle the problem at source by capturing queens before they can found a new colony. The council provides a trap resembling a plastic coffee cup: a lid ensnares the hornet but lets other insects escape easily, while a sweet, fermenting liquid attracts the queen, who exhausts herself trying to escape and eventually drowns.

The narrator's minor role is to check the three traps hanging in his garden weekly, empty them and count the queens. It sounds simple, but on the counting day a live hornet may be inside, riled up and desperate. Then one can wait for it to weaken and drown, or swill the contents and trap it below the liquid surface. With up to 30 queens per trap, the result is a fermenting mass of death.

Dead queens are fished out with a fork and counted one by one. A string of corpses entangles each body, producing a sticky decomposing mess. During the last eight weeks, 361 queens were counted. Three traps may sound irrelevant against the continental scale, and perhaps they are, but a mature hornet nest in autumn can have 6,000 individuals, so potentially over two million fewer hornets may be patrolling the local landscape by autumn.

Guilt, ecological balance and an unsettled question

There is guilt about taking part in this gruesome ritual, however virtuous it seems within ecological balance. The hornets have no natural predators there, and humans created the mess, so humans must decide what to do. Yet velutina is doing only what millions of years of evolution have told it to be correct. Nature is dynamic, and species move and disrupt, including our own.

Both participants in this deathly dance may be indicator species fighting in new territory. What do they indicate: unbalance, adaptation, invasion, or a new start?

Aaran (Mirror Walk) 2025, by William Bock: “One of the six people who walked an old funeral path over the mountain carrying a mirror.”

“Green Spain is finished” and gentrification

Se acabó la España Verde. Translated, “Green Spain is finished.” That is the verdict of a neighbour in his sixties who has lived there all his life as he watches his orchard gasp for breath in early June. Green Spain is yellowing.

Moving into seemingly dying mountain communities carries contradictions. It is not only climate that is shifting. Older generations, who learned to survive through sophisticated kitchen gardens and transhumance agriculture, are dying or entering care homes each day. They are being replaced, but by what: day-trippers, tourists, blow-ins, or wealthy buyers from Madrid and elsewhere in Spain, including guiris from northern Europe? Villages empty, holiday homes and rentals spread, and gentrification grips them. A few climate migrants stay permanently, yet the generational chain is weakened and village life is hollowed.

The narrator contrasts that future with his 88-year-old neighbour, Joaquín, who has never used a computer or been on a plane, can make scythe handles and build houses, and plants seedlings and harvests timber according to the phases of the moon. It raises an ItInsightsWorld question: is there an alternative future for depopulating mountain villages beyond gentrification and becoming playthings for urban elites?

Ecomuseos, memory and new rituals

Green shoots of regeneration appear amid decline. New meanings and rituals challenge the chauvinism of the urban, which has been dominant for decades. Some villages have undertaken deep processes of self-study and ethnography, reviving old festivals; others invented new festival forms while recognising the need for evolution and change.

For two years, the narrator's wife has worked with one local heritage organisation, La Ponte (The Bridge, in Asturiano), a rural research centre and ecomuseo that helps people learn old ways. Ecomuseos are grassroots projects that, as in “ecology”, borrow the prefix “eco-” from oikos, the ancient Greek for “dwelling” or “household”. La Ponte's small team works to bring generations together to remember place names at risk of being forgotten, songs no longer passed on, and craft techniques close to extinction. Its museum is not a static indoor collection of decontextualised objects. Visitors move slowly through the valley, chat on cobbled streets with locals, see Paleolithic cave art and explore pre-Romanesque sacred art that is 1000-year-old. The people and territory are the museum, showing that learning from the past for the future can happen at all times, in all places.

The radical underpinning is a desire to revalorise rural life against the urban machine, to make local knowledge relevant within global challenges, and to learn how to survive here, in one mountain valley. Most of all, these initiatives spin threads that may hold tradition and knowledge long enough to survive in some new form.

A train, a folk song and a photographic lineage

These themes returned recently while the narrator sat on a high-speed train moving across vast arid plains at 250km per hour. Across from him, travelling from southern Spain to Leon in the north-west, were two elderly couples. At one point one woman sang an old Leonese folk song in a low voice to pass the time. The incongruity felt like an omen, recalling a refrain from Alastair McIntosh's Soil and Soul about a broken Circle and departed faeries.

The photographs are by William Bock, from the Dinnseanchas Project. Dinnseanchas means lore of place, and the project weaves voices of farmers, artists and communities reflecting on land, language and belonging in Ireland's coastal uplands.

The narrator was one of the seven commissioned artists in the Dinnseanchas Project working on the western uplands of Ireland. In West Cork, he met communities who have lived through dramatic changes in their lifetime; the Borlin Valley was among the last places in Ireland to get electricity. Their stories of resilience, slow cultural and ecological loss, alongside deep connection with the land, were remarkable. In response he made artworks including an audio-visual installation inside a farm jeep, published writings, short films and a workshop series.

William Bock is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ireland producing projects for and about diverse communities and the environments they inhabit. His practice examines living between cultures, landscapes and identities through collaborative filmmaking, photography, field recording, performance and installation; the work appeared in Issues 18 and 22.

For ItInsightsWorld, the ending is less a conclusion than a measure of what can be done locally: count, remember, repair, gather, and keep knowledge in circulation while the mountain conditions themselves keep changing.