Southwestern Europe

Southwestern Europe stretches from the Atlantic coast of Portugal across the Iberian Peninsula and France to the western Mediterranean islands of Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearics. Three great mountain systems shape the land: the Pyrenees along the Franco-Spanish border, the French Alps reaching to Mont Blanc (4,808 metres, the regional high point), and the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, where Mulhacén rises to 3,479 metres. Between them sit the Iberian Meseta — a high central plateau — and the broad lowlands of the Garonne, Rhône, Tagus, and Ebro basins. Coastlines are long and varied, from Atlantic cliffs in Brittany and Galicia to the calanques of Provence and the sandy bays of Mallorca.

Climate is dominated by the Mediterranean pattern of hot dry summers and mild wet winters (Köppen Csa and Csb), but the region holds far more diversity than that label suggests. Atlantic France and the Cantabrian coast of northern Spain are oceanic (Cfb), interior France grades into continental, and the high mountains rise into alpine (ET) conditions. A semi-arid pocket sits in southeastern Spain — home to Europe's only true desert at Tabernas, with a cold-steppe (BSk) climate.

The signature biome is Mediterranean forest, woodland, and scrub. Cork oak (Quercus suber), holm oak (Q. ilex), Aleppo and stone pines, and dense communities of cistus, rosemary, lavender, and thyme cover much of the lowlands and hills. Where rainfall drops, this transitions into garrigue and matorral — open, fire-adapted shrubland. Northern Spain and Atlantic France hold temperate broadleaf forest of beech and oak, and the highest slopes carry mixed conifer forest and alpine meadow above the treeline. The flora is exceptionally diverse for its area, with thousands of endemic species across the Iberian Peninsula and the western Mediterranean islands.

For terrarium builders, the region's catalogue contribution sits mainly in the Atlantic moss and fern flora shared with the rest of temperate Europe — species that extend into Galicia, the western Pyrenees, and northwestern France. The Mediterranean flora proper, with its drought-tolerant geophytes and aromatic shrubs, is better suited to open or arid terrarium styles than to enclosed humid ones.