Origen Sin: How Bioparc Fuengirola Botched Its Own Photo Contest

The idea was handsome enough. Bioparc Fuengirola, marking a quarter-century of housing tropical species in a coastal Andalusian town, would celebrate with a photography competition called “Origen.” The stated aim: photographs taken inside the park that reflect conservation of biodiversity, the connection between people and nature, and the beauty and singularity of the environment. A EUR 4,000 prize for the winner, EUR 2,000 donated to a conservation project in their name, and 25 finalists exhibited inside the park.

Noble language. Questionable execution.

The Rewrite

The contest launched in late March 2026 with one set of rules: submissions from 26 March to 26 April, a trip for two as the prize, no entry fee. Press coverage across AZ Costa del Sol and El Espanol ran with those terms. Then, on 9 April, a new “Convocatoria Publica (Actualizacion)” appeared. The deadline stretched to 31 May. The trip vanished, replaced by the EUR 4,000 cash purse. And a EUR 30 entry fee materialised - bundled, generously, with a single day’s admission to the park.

One day. Bioparc Fuengirola opens at ten in the morning. In spring it closes around seven in the evening - nine hours of access for a photographer who has never set foot inside, who must learn the layout, locate the animals, read the light, and produce a competition-worthy image. Any wildlife photographer will tell you: the golden hours are dawn and dusk, and neither falls within the park’s operating window. The midday Andalusian sun is beautiful for tourists. For a photographer chasing conservation-grade emotion, it is a floodlight.

One image per entrant. Thirty euros for the privilege.

The Moving Target

The original call sought photographs reflecting “conservation of biodiversity, the connection between people and nature, and the beauty and singularity of the environment.” Broad enough to accommodate almost anything shot within the park’s dense tropical walkways. Participants composed and submitted accordingly.

Then Bioparc selected its 25 finalists - and the theme changed. The updated rules replaced the original brief with a new tagline: “Imagenes que inspiran, emociones que protegen la vida” - images that inspire, emotions that protect life. A different frame entirely. But reframing the contest after the fact is not how you build trust with people who paid thirty euros and spent a day squinting through a viewfinder.

The organisers reserved the right to modify the rules “for justified reasons” - Clause 18 of the legal bases. A useful clause. A clause that does a great deal of heavy lifting.

The Phantom Vote

Public voting ran from 5 to 25 June on the Bioparc website. The rules gave this popular vote a 40 per cent weighting; the remaining 60 per cent belonged to a professional jury - whose members, as of this writing, remain unnamed and unidentified. Sixty per cent of the decision, entrusted to faces without names. In total, the poll recorded 5,968 responses.

Or did it? Multiple participants reported the same experience: navigate to the voting page, select a photograph, and be greeted instantly by a “Thank you for your vote” message - without having actually cast one. The system appeared to register gratitude before registering intent. Whether this was a caching error, a cookie conflict, or something more structural, the effect was the same: voters locked out, believing they had already participated when they had not.

Bioparc’s rules note that the organisation “reserves the right to supervise and validate the results of the public vote to guarantee its correct functioning.” One wonders what that supervision looked like.

The Winner

The result, announced on schedule at the end of June, was - “Instinto”. Among 25 finalists bearing titles like “Vinculo Eterno,” “La vida en pausa,” and “Instinto en silencio,” the winning image was, reportedly, a Sumatran tiger peering through foliage. It is a perfectly decent subject. Bioparc is rightly proud of its Sumatran tiger conservation work. But as the culmination of a contest demanding images that “transcend the visual” and “awaken emotions about conservation” - a charismatic megafauna portrait is, to put it gently, the path of least resistance. It is the equivalent of a poetry prize going to a sonnet about the moon.

Proteger empieza por sentir. Y sentir empieza por mirar.

So said the original brief. “Protecting begins with feeling. And feeling begins with looking.” Fair enough. But feeling also begins with fairness, and looking begins with transparency.

What Goes Wrong

None of this is unique to Bioparc. Pay-to-enter photography contests have drawn criticism across the industry for years. Will Moneymaker Photography and PictureCorrect, among others, have documented the ethical fault lines: entry fees that function as revenue streams, rights grabs buried in the fine print, and judging processes opaque enough to discourage scrutiny. Bioparc’s contest hits several of these marks. The legal bases claim an exclusive, gratuitous transfer of reproduction, distribution, and public communication rights for all submitted images - not just the winner’s, but every entrant’s.

A park celebrating conservation might have found a way to celebrate photographers, too. Open the gates at dawn for participants. Offer a weekend pass, not a single day. Run the voting system through a tested third-party platform. Keep the theme stable. And when the jury picks a winner, let it be a surprise - not the most photogenic predator in the building.

Twenty-five years is worth honouring. The photographers who paid, shot, and submitted deserved better than this.