Iberian lynx

Name and taxonomy

Coenraad Jacob Temminck named the species Felis pardina in 1827. He worked from skins of lynx killed near the Tagus river in Portugal and sold in Paris and London. The cat now sits in the genus Lynx, in the family Felidae. It is monotypic, which means no subspecies are recognised.

The word lynx comes through Latin from the Greek, from a root that means light, for the shine of the eyes. English speakers also call it the Spanish lynx or the pardel lynx. In Spanish and Portuguese it is lince ibérico.

Evolution and relatives

Fossils place the cat on the peninsula from the close of the Early Pleistocene, about one million years ago. It is thought to descend from Lynx issiodorensis, an extinct lynx of Europe. Genetic work places its split from other lynx at 1.98 to 0.7 million years ago. The Eurasian lynx is its nearest living kin, and the two shared parts of the peninsula until the 20th century.

The species once ranged beyond Iberia. Bones from Arene Candide in northern Italy date to about 24,820 to 18,620 years ago. A specimen from a cave in southern France dates to about 3780 years ago. In 2021 a large deposit of Iberian lynx remains about 40,000 years old turned up at Ingarano in Apulia, southern Italy.

Appearance

The coat is short and bright yellowish to tawny, marked with dark spots. The spots run in lines and shrink in size from the back toward the flanks. Lynx from the Sierra Morena carry many tiny spots, while lynx from Doñana carry fewer, larger spots in dotted rows. A white lynx has been recorded twice, most recently photographed in Jaén in October 2025.

The head is small, the legs are long and the tail is short with a black tip. Males measure 74.7 to 82 cm in head and body, with a tail of 12.5 to 16 cm, and weigh 7 to 15.9 kg. Females measure 68.2 to 77.5 cm and weigh 9.2 to 10 kg. The Iberian lynx is about half the size of the Eurasian lynx and close to a bobcat in size. The skull is short, which gives the canine teeth more bite force for a killing bite on small prey.

Habitat and range

The lynx needs a mosaic of dense Mediterranean scrub and open grassland below about 1300 metres. Scrub gives it cover for resting and for dens. Open patches hold the rabbits. In Doñana the land is flat, from sea level to about 50 metres, with a mild climate shaped by the Atlantic.

In the 1950s the species still ranged from the Mediterranean north to Galicia and across central and southern Spain. Between the early 1960s and 2000 it lost about 80 percent of that range. By 2012 breeding was confirmed only in the Sierra Morena and on the coastal plains of Doñana.

The range has grown again. Lynx now breed in the Sierra Morena, the Montes de Toledo, several parts of Extremadura, Albacete and the Sierras Subbéticas. In Portugal a reintroduced population holds the Guadiana Valley. A new project has started in the region of Murcia.

Diet and hunting

The European rabbit is the main food, and it makes up about 75 percent of what the cat eats. A male needs about one rabbit a day. A female with kittens eats three. When rabbits are scarce the lynx turns to red-legged partridge, rodents, hares and ducks, and sometimes young deer or mouflon.

The lynx hunts alone, mostly at dusk and by night when rabbits move. It kills with one bite to the back of the neck that cuts the spinal cord. Larger cats suffocate their prey instead. It walks about 7 kilometres a day through its range in search of prey.

The cat also kills smaller carnivores that compete with it, including red foxes, Egyptian mongooses and genets. It does so more often when prey is scarce. Bacteria in its gut appear to help it digest rabbit and even the plant matter in a rabbit's stomach.

Behaviour and social life

Like most cats, the Iberian lynx lives alone. Each adult holds a home range of about 4 to 20 square kilometres, and the range stays stable for years. Where rabbits are plentiful the range shrinks to 5 to 10 square kilometres. A male's range overlaps those of several females, and each sex drives off rivals of its own sex.

The lynx marks its ground with urine, scratches on tree bark and droppings. It rests through the hottest hours and is most active around sunset. In summer it is almost strictly nocturnal, while in winter it may move at any hour. Young lynx are active by day in their first year and then switch to night.

Young adults leave home to find a territory, and most go by the age of two. The average move is about 16 kilometres, though some travel 3 to 30. Dispersal is the most dangerous time of life, and about 48 percent of dispersing lynx die each year. The populations are small and scattered, so they depend on corridors of scrub between them.

Communication and senses

Like all cats, the lynx has vertical pupils and sees well in dim light. Its large tufted ears give it sharp hearing. The whiskers report fine detail by touch. The ear tufts probably help the cat pick up faint sounds, as in other lynx.

Adults are mostly silent. They call when threatened or when a mother has kittens, and distressed kittens cry out. Scent does the rest of the talking, through urine and scratch posts along the borders of a range.

Reproduction and life cycle

Mating peaks in January, and the breeding season runs from January to July. It is the only time males and females meet. Most pairings are polygynous, but in crowded parts of Doñana a male may guard one female alone. Gestation lasts 63 to 73 days, and most kittens are born in March and April.

A litter holds 2 to 4 kittens, usually 3. The mother gives birth in a tree hollow, a rock cave or an enlarged burrow. After about twenty days she starts moving the kittens between dens under bushes, and may use as many as six. Kittens take meat at one month and stop nursing at 10 weeks. Usually only two survive to weaning.

The young hunt for themselves at 7 to 10 months but stay near the mother until about 20 months. Both sexes can breed at one year, but a female waits until she has a territory of her own. One female did not breed until five, when her mother died. The oldest wild lynx on record reached 13 years.

Predators and threats

An adult Iberian lynx has no natural predators. People and their machines kill it instead. Road traffic causes most deaths: 14 lynx died on roads in 2013, 21 in 2014 and 144 in 2023. Snares laid for rabbits and foxes killed more lynx than anything else in the 1990s, and poaching still takes about 5 percent a year. Dogs, wells and forest fires kill more.

The deeper threat is the rabbit. Myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease cut rabbit numbers again and again in the 20th century, and the lynx did not switch prey. Roads, resorts and tree plantations cut the scrub into fragments. Isolation forces inbreeding, which lowers sperm quality and raises deaths from disease. Feline leukaemia killed several lynx in 2007, and one male tested positive for feline immunodeficiency virus in 2013.

Population and conservation

In 1988 a survey estimated 880 to 1150 adults in nine populations. By 2002 only 94 survived, all in Andalusia. The count rose to 326 in 2012, 856 by the end of 2019 and 2,021 in 2024, with 1,730 in Spain and 291 in Portugal. The IUCN listed the species as Vulnerable in 2024, because more than 2,000 mature animals now live in the wild.

Captive breeding drove much of the recovery. A female named Saliega bore the first captive litter, three kittens, at El Acebuche in Doñana on 29 March 2005. A Portuguese centre near Silves has bred 122 lynx, of which 89 survived and 73 went to the wild. Spain and the European Union spent about 90 million euros on the species between 1994 and 2013.

Releases began at Guadalmellato in 2009 and in Portugal's Guadiana Valley in 2015. Managers also plant scrub, restock rabbits and build road crossings. The cat is on CITES Appendix I and the European Habitats Directive. Frozen embryos and eggs from Saliega sit in liquid nitrogen in Madrid as a reserve for the future.

Relationship with humans

For most of the last century Spain treated the lynx as vermin. The state paid bounties for carcasses, and hunters sold the fur. A law under Franco listed the cat as a pest from the 1950s until the late 1970s. Spain protected the species in 1973 and Portugal in 1974.

The lynx poses almost no risk to people or livestock. No attack on a person has been recorded, and attacks on farm animals are very rare. Game estates once blamed it for lost rabbits, but fewer lynx probably meant more rabbit disease, not more rabbits. Today the cat draws wildlife tourists to Andújar and Doñana, and it is probably the best known symbol of Spanish conservation.

In culture and myth

The lynx of ancient writers was a creature of strange powers. Theophrastus wrote that its urine set hard into a gem called lyngurium, and Pliny and Ovid passed the story on. Bestiaries repeated it until the 17th century. In Ovid's Metamorphoses the goddess Ceres turns King Lyncus into a lynx after he tries to kill her messenger Triptolemus.

Medieval scholars held that a lynx saw through walls, so the animal came to stand for clear sight and hidden truth. In 1603 Federico Cesi founded the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome with a lynx on its emblem. The astronomer Hevelius named a faint constellation Lynx in 1687, because only a lynx could see its stars. Spanish speakers still say a sharp-eyed person has ojos de lince.

In Spain the animal appears in Goya's 1799 print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, where a lynx sits in the shadows. In 2019 the Portuguese street artist Bordalo II built a lynx from rubbish in Lisbon's Parque das Nações. Spirit-animal blogs say the lynx is a keeper of secrets in Native American lore, but that claim is likely about the Canada lynx.