ABSTRACT

The present practice in Spanish cultural heritage protection and management is marked by the high presence of historical and archaeological landscapes in research and theoretical formulations and by the fragmentary presence of these conceptions in territorial strategies of protection and development. This situation that, in general terms, can be presented as paradigmatic of Mediterranean countries, contrasts with the situation in the Netherlands and in northern Europe in general, where the transformation of the present-day landscape has opened the opportunity of establishing closer links with sustainable management of the archaeological-historical elements and structures of the cultural landscape.

In this paper we propose to explore the possibilities and perspectives of applying PDL/BBO and Belvedere concepts such as “conservation through development” to the Spanish context and we analyse to what extent Spanish practices can take advantage of the PDL/BBO experience. After presenting an overview of the treatment of archaeological-historical resources in current Spanish cultural heritage management policies, we take into consideration the PDL/BBO research programme's aims and structure with the aim of developing new ways of thinking about the sustainable development of archaeologicalhistorical landscapes in Spain following the successes of the PDL/BBO programme.

KEYWORDS

Mediterranean countries, cultural landscapes, landscape research traditions, legal dispositions, cultural parks

INTRODUCTION: GOAL AND PROBLEM

Landscape has, for several decades, been fully incorporated into Spanish archaeological research (see synthesis in Orejas 1995). However, the development in the last 10 years of archaeological landscape studies and the implementation of transdisciplinary research projects have allowed the recent revision of theoretical concepts and the development of methods and techniques of landscape analysis. Landscape is nowadays the core object of several historical and archaeological projects that consider it a spatial synthesis of social relations (see for example Criado/Parcero 1997; Burillo 1998; and more recently, Sanchez-Palencia/Orejas/Ruiz del Árbol 2005).

This situation in research contrasts with the present practice in the protection and management of Spanish cultural heritage in which archaeological and historical landscapes have little weight or a fragmentary presence in a background in which the protection and development of the territory is the domain of environmentalists or urban planners.