Territory and landscape: conceptual and methodological basis for the special plan to protect the Nansa valleys (Cantabria)

Abstract

This paper describes the work done in recent years to fix the conceptual and
methodological basis and set targets for a planning instrument — a special plan — to safeguard
and activate the spatial heritage and landscape of a mountainous Atlantic area in northern Spain:
the Nansa valleys in Cantabria. It is important to note that the planning initiative falls within the
framework of a broader rural-development programme, in which the considerations and proposals
of the plan acquire their full meaning. The purpose and specificity of the plan lies in the
interpretation, valuation and conservation of territory that has historically been built on the geoecological
scale of the valley, around a cluster of villages that organize their traditional privative
spaces — village territories — by integrating a mosaic of plant cover, uses and functions with a
long history and more recent changes. The materiality of the landscape, its perception and
reading enable the living inheritance of secular means of populating and using the space to be
recognized. But its interest lies not only in the permanence of legible traces and in the harmony
of the whole, but in the rationality of an agricultural, forestry and pastoral system that is still
living, albeit with difficulties, in the sustainable management of resources that the system
assures. The plan obviously addresses the protection of items, complexes and areas of high
natural and cultural value, but above all it also has the challenge of organising the most significant
processes of spatial change (growth of traditional settlements; actions to renovate and reuse
scattered farm buildings for winter use; new uses for infrastructure), such that the landscape, as
heritage and as a resource, can maintain its character, identity and substantive values.