Environmental management and nature conservation policy in Franco’s Spain

Abstract

In principle, it might be thought that nature conservation was an important concern in the early Francoist period, due to the owing to its sympathies towards agrarian ruralism and the green streak in other European fascist movements, like the German national socialism. However, the conservation policy, which had been developed in Spain during the first third of the twentieth century as a part of the general modernization process of the country, was dismantled under Franco. Later on, after a long break of thirty years, and in the context of the intense industrialization period of the "desarrollismo", a peculiar incipient ecologist movement –without links with the early Spanish conservationist tradition of the beginning of the twentieth century– arose. At the same time, a public policy of nature conservation was implemented which was apparently ambitious, although in practice it had not moved away from the productivist and utilitarian vision of nature at the service of economic growth which had been dominant throughout Francoist period.