Spanish dehesas as heritage: using participatory mapping and archival data to characterise the temporal evolution of an agrosilvopastoral cultural landscape

ABSTRACT

Dehesas, together with other private and communal agrarian landscape management enclosures, form part of a managed, sustainable, agrosilvopastoral landscape organisation in Spain. They embody the historic human arrangement of landscape resources in a semi-natural state where equilibrium exists between pasturing, farming and Mediterranean forest management. With their origins in the medieval period, many persist until the present day in different regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Today, dehesas represent a unique form of landscape history and character in the Spanish Portuguese Duero River borderlands. By the twentieth century, many of these historically managed landscapes had been confiscated and sold, resulting in new forms of territorial management. In the Comarca of Sayago, a region located in the south-west of Zamora province, Spain, landscape abandonment and twentyfirst century natural park preservation strategies have contributed to a rise of a more homogenous vegetative landscape that has replaced centuries of the once ecological diverse landscape of which dehesas formed an integral part. With population decline, the memory of the names, use and management of these dehesas is fading. Using three case studies, this research provides a temporal analysis of the dehesas in the Sayago region, their historic use and management, and their importance to the diachronic character, heritage and future sustainability of this region. New cartography is created delineating and characterising historic land use. Our findings demonstrate the importance of integrated, people-centred approaches to recover and valorise endangered landscape history and heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Dehesas
• enclosed pasture lands
• landscape memory
• sustainability
• abandonment
• depopulation
• Participatory Mapping
• landscape heritage
• Spain

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful for the support from Almudena Orejas of the Spanish National Research Council and Eloísa Ramírez of the Universidad Pública de Navarra. Special thanks go to all the people of Sayago whose participation made this study possible.

This research was supported by a doctoral research fellowship from the Public University of Navarre and support from the Institute for Advanced Social Science Research (I-COMMUNITAS). Additional financial support is from the project LOKI (Local Economies, Imperial Economy: Western Iberia (II b.c.–II a.d.) PID2019-104297GB-I00) and the project PID2021-128356NB-I00 ‘Propuesta de diseño institucional y comunitario para una ordenación del territorio integral en la transición hacia una economía sostenible’ Plan Estatal de investigación 2021–2023, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación del Gobierno de España.

Notes

1 In the eighteenth century CME, M refers to mediodia, ‘South’, N refers to norte, ‘North’, P refers to poniente, ‘West’, and L refers to levante, ‘East’.

2 Source https://bibliotecadigital.jcyl.es/es/consulta/ registro.cmd?id=714 [accessed 22/12/2022].

3 Source: Diccionario de la lengua Española: Edición del Tricentenario https://dle.rae.es/?w=diccionario [accessed 29/12/2022].

4 Source National Statistical Institute of Spain (INE); https://www.ine.es/prodyser/pubweb/censo_corona/ Censo_Corona_F.pdf [accessed 19/09/2023].