The Mesa del Sénia Association promotes the training of new technicians who know how to erect and recover dry stone constructions. When it came to recovering and enforcing this agricultural heritage, common to the 27 towns of the community, it was detected that knowledge about this dry stone construction technique was being lost.
From January to June, seven people are trained in a learning workshop, with a teacher trained in France, where dry stone has regulated studies.
The objective is for the apprentices, at the end of the course, to establish themselves on their own to continue working in the territory, where more than five thousand dry stone constructions have been inventoried. The workshop has been financed with the help of 126,000 euros from the Spanish government.
The general secretary for the Demographic Challenge, Francés Boya, visited this Thursday the work group that is formed to learn the construction technique of dry stone in the towns of the community of Sénia, 27 municipalities of Catalonia, Aragon and the Community Valencian.
Boya has visited Freginals (Montsià), Rossell (Baix Maestrat) – where the learning group now practices – and Penyaroja de Tastavins (Matarraña).
Boya has stressed that the dry stone represents “the roots, and the esteem in the territory” of the ancestors, who had “care of the territory” to guarantee “the dignity” of the people who worked and lived there.
For the secretary general, the dry stone agricultural heritage “must be recovered” because the territory “is not something abstract”, “it is the people, the culture, the traditions and the personality, and it must be cultivated and cared for.” “In the same way that we want to remake the dry stone walls, we must be careful when taking care of the culture of the territory,” he claimed from Freginals.
The secretary general has committed to expanding “the framework of collaboration” with the Sénia Board, based on the various lines of aid of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge.
“At Fundació Biodiversitat we promote a series of aid that could include, even something more ambitious in this sense. We will study which is the best of the lines to continue working in this area and help the territory to conserve heritage, which is moreover the heritage of the humanity and we must contribute to its maintenance,” he said.
Boya has recognized that solutions are still needed to the challenge of facing “depopulation, aging and the migration of young people” and finding tools to “invigorate the territories” and the Sénia Roundtable is an example.
The president of the Commonwealth, Alexis Albiol, has detailed that the 27 towns of Sénia represent 115,000 inhabitants spread over an area of ??2,000 square kilometers. 11 municipalities have a population density of less than 12 inhabitants per square kilometer. In fact, 21 of the towns bring together 17% of the population of the Tierras del Sénia and the majority have lost population in the last fifteen years.
The dry stone heritage is “witness of an ancestral human activity” that “has shaped” the landscapes of this territory, according to Albiol, who pointed out that the abandonment of agricultural activity and the modernization of the sector has meant the loss of knowledge to recover, since these constructions have an “aesthetic and also environmental” value.
