NATIONAL parks in Spain saw a record 15 million visitors last year, representing a 77% rise since 1997, according to recently-released figures.
With 15 National Parks in the country, this works out at one million for each one in 2016 – 83,333 per park every month, 19,231 a week or 2,747 a day.
The most-visited and the best-known is the Teide in Tenerife, where tourists can climb right into the crater of a 3,781-metre-high dormant volcano – and in fact, nearly 4.1 million did so last year.
Other National Parks which enjoyed a huge rise in visitor numbers were the Sierra Nevada in the province of Granada – Spain's most famous skiing destination in winter and a favourite with hikers in summer – the 2,000-metre-high Picos de Europa mountains (pictured) on the Cantabria-Asturias border, and the Atlantic Islands off the coast of the north-western region of Galicia.
The Picos de Europa saw the third-highest number of visitors, at just over 2.1 million, just behind the Sierra de Guadarrama – a mountain range to the north-west of the region of Madrid and spilling into the province of Segovia (Castilla y León), where well over 2.4 million tourists made a trip in 2016.
Fourth highest for numbers of visitors was the Timanfaya National Park, an eerie desert-lunar landscape on the island of Lanzarote, which 1.7 million tourists visited.
The Sierra Nevada, Spain's largest National Park at over 35,000 acres, was graced with 734,539 visitors, not far behind the Garajonay National Park on the tiny Canarian island of La Gomera, with 870,486 tourists.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com