Two endangered Iberian lynx have been found dead on roads in the last week in the southern province of Jaén.
Environmental officials in Andalusia reported that a female lynx was found on Monday on a road while another female had been killed by a vehicle five days earlier.
One lynx had been tracked by a radio transmitter but the other was not yet fully grown and had not been tracked by researchers.
The Iberian lynx remains one of the world's most endangered cats although its status has dropped from “critically endangered” to “endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature list.
The population had dwindled by the end of the 1900s due to habitat loss, illegal hunting and disease which killed their natural prey of rabbits.
By the end of the century just 94 lynx remained in two spots in Andalucia.
Since then, Spain has been taking significant measures to boost the lynx population in the wild. Captive breeding programmes and efforts to safeguard habitat resulted in a population of more than 300 by the end of 2014.
Highways, however, are one of the biggest threats to the lynx, according to World Wide Fund for Nature which tweeted “We have to continue improving the highways”.
