Cristina Hodgson
A PENGUIN has made an epic detour and ended up on a beach in the tourist hotspot town of Torremolinos.
Penguins are an unusual sight in southern Spain and so the appearance of one, waddling along one of Torremonlino’s most crowded beaches, La Carihuela, is a most unpresidented sight, and left beachgoers last Monday, July 3, questioning their vision (or alcohol intake).
The disorientated penguin, which had ‘visible signs of exhaustion’, was found stranded on the sand by bathers. The local authorities were informed and a rescue team was sent to aid the bird.
The penguin, believed to be a ‘Galician penguin’, which are birds that it nests on the coast of A Coruña and are very similar to the Arctic penguins, was successfully captured and rapidly placed in the hands of experts and given veterinary assistance.
The bird was then handed over to the Centre for the Recovery of Endangered Species (CREA) where it will be looked after until it makes a full recovery for its subsequent release back into its natural habitat.
The common murre or ‘Galician penguin’ is a seabird with an elongated body, slender beak and long legs that, in Spain, is included in the National Catalogue of Threatened Species in the endangered category, due to its reduced breeding population.
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