With two small children, we are always on the lookout for places where they can get a safari experience without being eaten by a lion or spending all day in a tourist minibus. A warm, sunny garden, full of wildlife is the answer, and Europe has plenty to offer.

Away from tourist resorts, you can rent a villa in the rural Mediterranean and give your child what the brilliant zoologist Gerald Durrell called the “gift of my childhood”.

While Durrell grew up in Corfu, we take our children to north-west Spain where the Cantabrian mountains are just a stone's throw from fabulous Atlantic beaches. Here it is greener and altogether more varied.

Last year, after a ferry crossing to Santander, I found myself face down in the coarse grass of the garden outside a small cottage we had hired. My son Jasper, who was only crawling, lay next to me and together we watched a minor miracle.

Spending so much time close to the ground, Jasper was adept at finding curiosities that I would otherwise miss. This time he spotted what looked like a tiny cigar suspended beneath the garden gate. The end opened and, before our widening eyes, a tiny, white praying mantis emerged.

The mantis looks like a skinny pensioner, who has sucked far too many lemons and wears pebble glasses. Above a pinched face sit two bulbous eyes whilst the front legs are clasped together in prayer. But these legs are barbed and they are a most efficient predator.

More poured out of the tube until, after a few minutes, these one centimetre carnivores were all over the gate and fence, marching off in search of their first breakfast. Their soft skins darkened and hardened in the sun and soon enough, a foraging ant's luck ran out as the praying legs shot out and snapped shut. The mantis began to chew whilst the ant still wriggled – though it did not struggle for long.

Jasper was utterly amazed and before long, he had appointed himself chief naturalist. Our cottage was in the Picos de Europa – a national park accessed from the coast by a drive up a spectacular gorge. We emerged into the rolling fields and woodlands of Espinama, surrounded in each direction by towering cliffs and peaks. Our cottage was in a tiny farming hamlet. There were flower-rich meadows in every direction and in the woods were huge, bulbous sweet chestnut trees. It’s not long ago that their carefully managed branches provided enough chestnuts to be the main source of carbohydrate for the mountain people here.

There are dense forests of beech, oak and strawberry tree and Jasper’s sharp little eyes were able to pick out birds overhead, including honey buzzards that feed on the grubs of bees and wasps. Each morning, Jasper and I would watch the sun creep up behind the cliffs a short distance from the village. Once there was enough uplift, huge griffon vultures the size of doors would take to the air, floating overhead and drifting off in search of goats and sheep that had lost their footing in the night.

However, the greatest interest was found in the garden, particularly where it began to merge with the surrounding meadows. Here, Jasper found all sorts of novelties: field crickets in burrows and glorious swallowtail butterflies. Every so often a brilliant purple violet carpenter bee, more than an inch long, would buzz past. Hornets were regular visitors, too, not to sting us but to catch flies and wasps that would otherwise annoy. As the evening drew in, Jasper found glowworms, and watched lizards dozing in the late afternoon sun on the garden wall.

On a small scale, this was like an African safari, with a non-stop succession of predators and prey but without the carbon footprint.