Los Barrios a village situated in a hollow fed by the Palmones River. The municipal area is extensive, stretching from the Sierra in the Alcornocales Natural Park to the coast. Among the mountains found here it is worth mentioning the Oratorio de San Isidro (Oratory) in the Cortijo de Tinoco, which forms the heart of the village, the Edificio de Posito (communal granary, 1764) and the Casa de las Doncellas. Worth a visit is the “Charco Redondo” reservoir, formed by the Palmones River, as well as the paintings by Bacinete. Equally one may follow the itineraries of el Quejigal and Arroyo de San Carlos del Tiradero. Marvellous views can be taken in from the viewing points in “Hoyo Don Pedro”.
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The Betty Molesworth Park
Betty Molesworth was born in New Zealand in 1913. She was a remarkable woman and overcame serious illness to become an eminent Botanist gaining worldwide recognition for discovering a unique and ancient fern growing between rocks in Alcornocales National Park.
When she was a child she overcame Cancer, Poliomyelitis and Tuberculosis, spending so much time in hospital that she had to have private education often from her hospital bedside. When she recovered she worked in a museum in Auckland where she met the Botanist Lucy Cromwell. Lucy was working on organising the specimens collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during their epic voyage on HMS Endeavour. This inspired Betty to also become a Botanist and she studied Botanical Taxonomic at Dunedin University of New Zealand where she specialised in ferns and similar species under her mentor Professor J Holloway. Although still very frail, shortly after WW2 started, Betty volunteered to become a first aid assistant to the forces. To convince the medical inspector that she was stronger than in fact, she said she practiced rock climbing so managed to escape a chest X-ray and was enrolled. Towards the end of the war she returned to the Museum to become the Botanist as Lucy had married and left. Betty then won a scholarship to the University of Basle to pursue her knowledge of Pacific Island Flora. She took an intense course in tropical vegetation in Malaysia for 3 months in 1947 and whilst there met and married Geoffrey Allen, a pilot and enthusiastic Ornithologist.
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This gave them wonderful opportunities to work together and they left the safety and comfort of Basle to embark on travels and field expeditions to Borneo and Thailand, for him to study birds and for her to collect plants especially ferns. It was a marriage that lasted 40 years built on mutual love for each other and nature. When not travelling Betty worked in the botanical herbal gardens of Singapore. They shunned the social scene with the British Colonial Society, even though advised by some ‘grand dame’ that Betty would risk career and marriage, which greatly amused her husband, preferring their adventures gathering information on flora and fauna and often facing dangerous territories, cholera and wild animals. In 1963 they retired to Los Barrios in Andalusia, continuing their interests. Geoffrey made important contributions to ornithology. He died in 1985. Betty wrote books on flowers and ferns and took an interest in everything around her in the area. It was in Alcornocales National Park that she gained world-wide recognition for discovering an ancient fern growing between the rocks, which had previously thought to have grown in humid tropical and sub tropical areas about 300 million years ago. It is called the Psilotum Nudum the ‘fork fern’. This discovery has also thrown doubts about the distribution of plants and the appropriate physical geography.
In recognition of her great contributions to the environment, locally she was made an adopted daughter of the town of Los Barrios in 1988 and a botanical park was named in her honour. In 1988 she received the OBE. She died in Marbella in 2002, aged 89. She had no children. Her book - ‘Wild Flowers of Southern Spain’ is published by Santana on sale in many bookshops throughout Andalusia.
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