One dead and three injured after car accident involving wild boar

The passenger in the front seat of a car passed away after a frontal accident with another car. The presence of a wild board on the road may have contributed to the head-on collision in the northern seaside town of Calella.

The hit happened at the 122nd kilometer C-32 highway at around 9:29 pm on Monday. The passenger of one of the vehicles was critically injured and was taken to Barcelona's Clínic hospital, where he passed away the following day.

Three more people were also injured in the accident, one critical and two others severely. Emergency services took two of the injured to Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital in Badalona and the third one to the city of Mataró.

Since the start of 2023, 16 people have lost their lives on Catalan roads. Nine different Mossos d'Esquadra police teams, four firefighters teams, and four ambulances were sent to the place of the accident.

Growing feral pig problem

There are at least 200,000 wild boars in Catalonia, a figure that has more than doubled over the last decade despite hunting campaigns that kill around 70,000 per year. Most of these creatures can be found in the Barcelona and Girona areas.  

While there are many factors behind this exponential growth, from them breeding with abandoned Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs to them no longer having any natural predators, "the most relevant has been the expansion of irrigated land," says population ecologist and University of Barcelona PhD researcher Jaume Badia. 

In an interview with Catalan News, the scientist explained that this method of farming has become more commonplace despite Catalonia's dry Mediterranean climate. "Because it is more productive, at the same time this is a double-edged sword because the farmer gets more production, gets more money, but at the same time the wild boars get more food."