Long evolution of landscape in a mountain area: Rozas (Valle de Cabuérniga, Cantabria)

Abstract

Sometimes the top of the forest’ trees conceal the vestiges of past landscapes, the traces of a more complex spatial organization of which we see today. Its discovery and reconstruction of both the forms and the process from its origin to its abandonment, is a subject of great interest, so much a properly scientific perspective - it contributes to the knowledge of the history of cultural landscapes, changes in the forms of organization of territory-, as much the valuation of the landscapes beyond his mere aesthetic considerations. The example studied here is highly expressive and revealing of these processes. It shows a cyclic sequence, from the more extensive forms of exploitation silvopastoral, its partial conversion into an area of meadows, the installation of a small village inhabited with its arable land setting, and then its progressive abandon and slowly moving back towards the primitive stadium. Its discovery was only possible through large-scale study, and only the combination and comparison of written documentary sources and physical remains provided by the exhaustive exploration of field, has allowed to reconstruct their history.