THE EMERGING MOUNTAIN IMAGINARY OF THE GALICIAN HIGHLANDS: A NEW NATIONAL LANDSCAPE IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION?

ABSTRACT

Mountains have been the object of an intense elaboration of national imaginaries. There is a widespread perception of Galicia as a rural and coastal country based on agricultural and seaside landscapes, with mountains being largely ignored. However, a production of local narratives around the Trevinca Massif has recently taken place, which has become quite widespread, with an emerging mountain landscape imaginary of its own around the notion of the Galician Highlands. This paper discusses these developments in the context of both the changing imaginaries of mountains in Western cultures and the different Galician landscape imaginaries. The research was carried out by means of semistructured interviewing, leading toward obtaining three narratives elaborated from semiotic clustering. These results allow us to infer that global forces, in particular tourism and promotion, have been essential for explaining the emergence and spread of the Galician Highlands as a socio-spatial imaginary. Another conclusion is the relevance of the disputed conception of “natural borders” coinciding with mountains in the case-study area.

Keywords::

• Galician Highlands
• globalization
• mountain
• nationalism
• socio-spatial imaginary

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge all the interviewees for their time and their insightful views. We thank Prof Holly Barcus and Prof William Moseley, who led the special issue where this paper is published, after the 27^th IGU CSRS Annual Colloquium held in Minnesota and Wisconsin (USA) in July 2019, including their review of an early draft of this manuscript. We are grateful for the helpful comments and criticisms made by the three anonymous referees. The authors would like to thank Carmel Sherrington and Prof Laura Lojo for their work editing the English on different versions of this paper. We also acknowledge Alejandro Gómez Pazo for his support producing the maps through intensive GIS effort and Dr Ricardo Gurriarán for granting us access to his personal archive. The customary disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. Following Debarbieux (2004), the attention here concentrates on Western countries, although the West is a very problematic concept (Lewis and Wigen 1997).

2. Under LEADER, specific rural regions are selected to encourage development projects and actions based on local strategies.

3. Except in the case of Porto, the other municipalities have more than one hamlet in their local government area. In order to refer to the area as a whole, we favor the municipal scale (with nine municipalities shown in Figures 3 and 5).

4. An EU network of protected areas. Despite the alleged consistency across the EU, protection is a national (in Spain, regional) responsibility. See https://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/natura2000/index_en.htm

5. GR is the acronym for Grande Randonnée in French, a European-wide system of official long-distance footpaths blazed with characteristic marks consisting of white and red stripes.

6. It is awarded by the Starlight Foundation (Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands).

7. https://www.fundacionstarlight.org/en/section/list-of-starlight-tourist-destinations/293.html.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork necessary to carry out these interviews was funded by the Galician Government (Project n. 2016-PG009: “Territorial Cooperation in the Galician Borderlands: Analyzing External and Internal Cross-border Governance”).