The fence that exists only on a phone

Jose Taboada draws a polygon on a map with his finger, and twenty-six Cachena cows understand where the mountain ends. Above the village of Vincios, in Galicia, a community that lost 80% of its forest to fire has handed the job of clearing the hillside back to animals. There are no posts and no wire — only a line on a screen and collars that hum when the herd drifts too far.

The line he drew is the boundary. When an animal approaches it, the collar sounds a warning tone; if it keeps going, the collar delivers a mild pulse, much like a conventional electric fence. The herd learns quickly. Alongside the cows graze roughly 60 Galician goats and 18 Galician sheep, all of them native breeds, all of them eating what the mountain provides — gorse, brambles, the shoots of invasive acacia that turn a slow fire into a fast one.

The decision came out of a bad October. In 2017, during the winds of ex-hurricane Ophelia, fire swept through Vincios and took about 80% of the community's more than 600 hectares of forest. In the nearby hamlet of Chandebrito, two women died. Afterwards the community looked at the slopes and saw what everyone in rural Galicia sees: scrub where people once cut, grazed and gathered, and no longer do. Animals could do that work again.

They began cautiously, buying five Cachena cows in May 2024 and committing to the collars, made by a Norwegian company founded by a goat farmer. A test plot of 40 hectares settled the argument. Grazed ground stayed clear of flammable scrub; the ungrazed control area grew thick brush again within a season. Researchers noticed something no one had planned for — the cattle's hoofprints break the crust of the soil, and rainwater sinks more readily into the aquifers below.

The forest itself belongs to no one in particular and to everyone in the parish: a monte veciñal en man común, communal land that cannot be divided, sold or seized for debt. Galicia has some 3,300 such communities holding close to a quarter of the region. It is a form of ownership that makes a decision like this one possible — a village can simply choose to put cows on its mountain.

The mountain has been worked before. The cows pass the Auga da Laxe petroglyphs, circles and spirals and wavy lines cut into granite some three thousand years ago. On burned ground below, the community planted more than a thousand chestnut trees after the fire, their roots inoculated with porcini spores, so that the recovery plot will one day yield mushrooms as well as timber.

Fire has not finished with Vincios. Part of the monte burned again in July 2025, drawing five helicopters. But the method has travelled: Vilamor and Sobredo, in O Courel, have taken up the same practice on their own slopes, four years after fires there. A breed almost gone, a tenure system from another century, and a collar that talks to a satellite — the hillside does not care which of them is old.