In a village of Castilla … Dealing with heritage conservation in a depopulation context

Abstract

The existence of small Historic Urban Areas with a recognized heritage value but a very limited capacity of intervention, it is quite frequent in Europe. The lack of demographic and economic dynamism -both the town itself and the territory where it is placed-, requires renewing the intervention criteria. About building conservation, monumental and not, it is needed an integrative vision of the heritage, the territory and the urban fact. It is not a new approach, but nowadays it acquires a special significance, because of the current economic context, the specific circumstances of these cases and international trends in the urban heritage field as the concept of Historic Urban Landscape. Communication reviews this situation in the region of Castilla y León (Spain), where an important amount of their historical towns reflects these features even unable to develop compulsory planning instruments. Pointing the need to generate new intervention strategies, they should consider the town and the territorial heritage, developing cooperative strategies and the adaptation of traditional mechanisms of protection to the characteristics and needs of this kind of realities.