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Eugenio Cabezas
Axarquía
Monday, 21 October 2024, 13:58
Dry stone walls (balates) have been part of the agricultural landscape of the Axarquía on the eastern side of Malaga province for several centuries serving to protect the land against erosion. Since 2018 the art of dry stone walling, traditional not only in other rural areas of Spain, but also in other European countries such as Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland was inscribed in 2018 on Unesco’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
In the Axarquía the walls have been used for centuries to plant olive trees, vines or cereals. Unfortunately, in recent years they are being lost and replaced by metal structures or directly by large earthworks to level the plots.
However, there are still living and active ‘balateros’ like Rafael Jiménez from Algarrobo, about whom SUR wrote an article in December 2021. Now the the culture commission in Spain’s Congreso de Diputados (lower house) has approved a proposal promoted by the political party Sumar to “protect the dry stone constructions and encourage citizen participation around these assets” present in several Andalusian areas.
In this sense, as reported through a statement the Sumar deputy for Malaga in Congress and general coordinator of IU Andalusia, Toni Valero, “the dry stone is an ancient building technique declared by UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity and is present throughout the country and in countless Andalusian areas such as Las Alpujarras, Sierra Magina, Los Pedroches, Sierra de Aracena or Axarquia, with its famous balates”.
The agreement sets out “the commitment” to support the regions and municipalities in the work of inventory and cataloguing of dry stone buildings while facilitating the acceleration of studies that promote their protection under the legal figures of heritage protection in force.
The second of the agreements contemplates “the improvement of the mechanisms of citizen participation, in line with the Faro Convention, for entities that develop activities around the architectural assets built with the dry stone technique”.
Valero considered that by “protecting the dry stone constructions of our fields and villages we protect and dignify the legacy of popular knowledge that extends throughout the country. This technique uses environmental resources such as wood, stones or earth. Men and women have been able to adapt to hostile environments by building boundaries, corrals, huts, threshing floors, wells, cisterns or paths, all with their hands and transmitting the techniques and knowledge from generation to generation in an oral and informal way”.
“Humble people have been authentic architects and engineers taking advantage of scarce resources in contexts of subsistence economies, the stones placed by skilled hands. Tightened without mortar and fitted together thanks to their own weight, they are the protagonists of this effort of adaptation of the people to the countryside”, Valero added.
The leader of the left coalition has also pointed out that “all these inherited landscapes are in a conservation emergency because it is difficult to preserve such abundant presence of these buildings, but also because they are forgetting the old construction techniques and the abandonment of small farms among other factors”.
The Non-Law proposal promoted by Valero has received the backing of all the groups of the cultural commission except Vox, which abstained.
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