Wolves in Europe: Where They Live and How Many There Are

Europe’s wolves at a glance

All of Europe’s wolves belong to one species, the gray wolf (Canis lupus). European wolves are mid-sized for the species, averaging about 38 kg (85 lb), although adult males in the north and east can be much heavier. Italian and Iberian wolves are smaller and are sometimes treated as separate subspecies.

Numbers are hard to compare, because countries count wolves in different ways and in different years. The figures below are recent official or expert estimates.

Bulgaria and Poland also have more than 1,000 wolves each, but their estimates vary widely depending on the method used.

How wolves disappeared from much of Europe

For centuries, wolves were killed with bounties, poison and organized hunts to protect livestock. They were gone from Britain by the late 1600s, from Ireland by the late 1700s, from most of Central Europe by about 1900 and from France by the 1930s. By the early 1970s they had almost vanished from Norway and Sweden.

Wolves never disappeared everywhere. Small populations hung on in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Balkans, the Carpathians, Poland, the Baltic states and Finland, which was connected to the much larger Russian population. Even these refuges shrank badly: Italy and Poland each had only about 100 wolves in the early 1970s.

Why wolves came back

Protection came first. Italy banned wolf hunting in 1971, the Bern Convention of 1979 listed the wolf as strictly protected, and the EU Habitats Directive of 1992 did the same for most member states. Poland protected wolves nationwide in 1998, and reunited Germany protected them from 1990.

At the same time, people left the countryside, forests spread and deer and wild boar became abundant. Wolves are also superb travelers. A young male fitted with a tracking collar in Saxony in 2009 traveled about 800 km (500 mi) in a straight line to Belarus. Unlike Yellowstone in the United States, almost all of Europe’s comeback happened without any wolves being released.

Italy and the Alps

Italy’s wolves recovered from a low of about 100 animals in the Apennine Mountains to roughly 3,300 in a 2020–2021 national survey, about 950 of them in the Alps and 2,400 in the rest of the peninsula. Packs now live in every Apennine region and even in the countryside around Rome.

Italian wolves spread north into the Alps and crossed into France in 1992, when the first two wolves were seen in Mercantour National Park. Switzerland’s first wolves arrived in the mid-1990s and its first pack formed in 2012 in the canton of Grisons. Austria’s first pack in more than a century appeared in 2016, on a military training area at Allentsteig. Our guide to animals of the Alps covers the other mountain wildlife that shares this range.

France, Spain and Portugal

From the Alps, wolves have spread across much of France, including Provence, the Jura, the Vosges, the Massif Central and the Pyrenees. The French Biodiversity Agency (OFB) estimated about 1,080 wolves in 2025. France also records some of the heaviest livestock losses in Europe, more than 10,000 animals a year, mostly sheep.

The Iberian wolf lives mainly in northwestern Spain and northern Portugal, with about 2,200–2,700 animals in total. Most live in Castile and León, Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria, and they are spreading south toward Madrid and Guadalajara. Portugal has about 300 wolves in 50–60 packs, all fully protected. A small, isolated population in the Sierra Morena of southern Spain has died out, the only European wolf population lost in recent years.

Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark

The most remarkable return happened in the lowlands of Central Europe. Wolves from western Poland raised pups on a military training area in Lusatia, Saxony, in 2000, the first known litter in Germany for well over a century. Germany now has wolves in all 16 states. The 2024/25 monitoring year confirmed about 220 packs and at least 1,600 individual wolves, and for the first time numbers barely changed from the year before.

Most dead wolves found in Germany are killed by traffic: of 684 found between 1990 and early 2022, 513 died on roads or railways and 71 were killed illegally.

German wolves soon crossed into neighboring countries. A female from Brandenburg settled in the Veluwe area of the Netherlands in 2018, and the first Dutch wolf pups in more than a century were born there in 2019. By 2024 the Netherlands had 11 packs. In Belgium, a female called Naya arrived from Germany in January 2018, and a pack has bred in the province of Limburg since 2020. In Denmark, where the last wolf was shot in 1813, a wolf was confirmed in 2012 and pups were filmed in 2017. About 40 adult wolves now live in Jutland.

Poland, the Baltic states and the Carpathians

Poland is the hinge between eastern and western Europe’s wolves. Since full protection in 1998, they have recolonized much of the country, and by 2019 researchers counted at least 95 resident packs west of the Vistula River alone. Strongholds include the Bieszczady Mountains, the forests of the northeast such as Białowieża, and Roztocze.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania hold several hundred wolves each, part of a population that continues into Belarus and Russia; regulated hunting is allowed there. The Carpathian population, shared mainly by Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia and southeastern Poland, was estimated at about 3,500–3,800 wolves in 2018 and is one of the largest in Europe.

Scandinavia and Finland

Wolves were almost extinct in Scandinavia by the 1970s. Then, around 1982, a pair of wolves from Finland or Russia settled in Värmland, in west-central Sweden, and raised pups in 1983. For years the whole population descended from just three founders, so inbreeding remains a concern, and every new wolf that arrives from the east is important.

The shared Swedish-Norwegian population was estimated at about 400–500 wolves in recent winters, most of them in Sweden. Norway keeps its wolves mainly in a “wolf zone” in the southeast near the Swedish border. Both countries regularly cull wolves to hold numbers down. Finland has about 290–330 wolves, linked to the large Russian population across its eastern border.

The Balkans and Greece

The Dinaric-Balkan population, stretching from Slovenia and Croatia through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria to Greece, was estimated at about 3,750–4,000 wolves in 2018. Together with the Carpathian wolves, it is one of the two largest wolf populations in Europe outside Russia and Belarus.

Protection varies widely across the region. Slovenia and Croatia protect their wolves, while in several non-EU Balkan countries they are hunted with few limits. Greece has about 1,000 wolves in its northern and central mountains, and Bulgaria’s estimates have exceeded 2,000.

How wolf protection changed in 2025

For more than 40 years the wolf was strictly protected across most of Europe, so it could only be killed under special permits, for example after repeated attacks on livestock. In December 2023 the European Commission published an analysis estimating about 20,300 wolves in the EU and proposed a lower level of protection.

Parties to the Bern Convention agreed in December 2024, and on 7 March 2025 the wolf moved from “strictly protected” to “protected”. In June 2025 the EU changed the Habitats Directive to match, moving the wolf from Annex IV to Annex V. Countries must still keep their wolf populations in good health, but they can now allow regulated culls more easily.

National responses differ. Spain’s parliament voted in March 2025 to allow wolf culls north of the Douro River again, and Germany added the wolf to its federal hunting law in April 2026, allowing regulated culls from July to October in regions where the population is judged to be in good condition. Switzerland, outside the EU, has run proactive culls since late 2023, killing 89 wolves between September 2025 and January 2026. Conservation groups argue that heavy culling can break up packs and does not always reduce attacks on livestock.

Living with wolves: livestock and protection

The 2025 continental assessment found that wolves kill about 56,000 domestic animals a year in the EU, roughly three per wolf. Because the EU has about 279 million farm animals, the average risk is tiny, around 0.02% a year, but losses are concentrated on a few farms and regions. Sheep and goats make up about two-thirds of the losses, and European countries spend roughly 17 million euros a year on compensation.

Wild prey is what most wolves actually eat. In Lusatia, where thousands of droppings have been analyzed, livestock made up less than 1% of the diet; roe deer, red deer and wild boar made up most of it. Our article on what wolves eat explains wolf diets in more detail.

The most widely used protections are electric fences, shepherds, night enclosures and livestock guardian dogs, large breeds raised with the flock that warn off wolves. Most countries pay compensation and many subsidize fences and dogs.

Are wolves in Europe dangerous?

Healthy wild wolves almost always avoid people. A 2021 review by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research found no fatal wolf attack in Europe between 2002 and 2020, even as wolf numbers grew. The few problems usually involve wolves that have lost their fear of people, often after being fed. In 2025 Dutch authorities authorized the removal of two bold wolves that had approached or bitten people, including one in the Utrechtse Heuvelrug area near Utrecht that bit a young child.

Never feed wolves or leave food out, keep dogs on a leash in wolf areas, and if you meet a wolf, stay calm, make yourself noticed and back away slowly. If anyone is hurt by any wild animal, call the European emergency number 112 immediately. For the full picture, see Are wolves dangerous?

Where to see wolves in Europe

Wild wolves are shy and mostly active at dawn, dusk and night, so most visitors find tracks or hear wolves howl rather than see one. The best-known wolf-watching area is the Sierra de la Culebra in Zamora, northwestern Spain, where guides scan open hillsides with telescopes at first light.

Other good areas include Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park in Italy, the Bieszczady Mountains of Poland, the forests of Lusatia in Germany and wildlife hides in eastern Finland near the Russian border, which also attract bears, as described in our guide to brown bears in Europe. Choose guides who keep their distance and follow local wildlife rules.