The municipalities are waiting to see how the preliminary draft of the new mountain law, which the Department of Territory of the Generalitat has announced will be ready in March for public exhibition, will be finalized. The proposal comes 41 years after the first regulations designed to give impetus to the most remote and depopulated areas of Catalonia. The Working document proposes creating the Alta Muntanya Technical Office with the mission of drawing up a six-year strategic action plan with multi-annual funding that has a supra-municipal impact.
From the Associació de Micropobles de Catalunya they regret that the initiative to promote the mountain areas has been delayed for so long, but they celebrate that, finally, when they enter the last year of the current legislature, the intention to ‘activate it and move forward with regard to the challenge of territorial balance. It should be remembered that the process to reformulate the 1983 law began in 2011; in 2017, the previous Government forged a document that remained in the drawer. Territory now proposes to incorporate as high mountain enclaves the counties of Berguedà, Solsonès, Pallars Jussà, Pallars Sobirà, Alta Ribagorça, Cerdanya, Ripollès and Val d’Aran, leaving out Garrotxa and other areas which included the previous proposal. “We have considered physical criteria, that the county has more than 60% of the surface at more than 700 meters of altitude and that the average slope is greater than 30%, and also demographic, that more than 40% from population centers are more than 750 meters and have less than 50 inhabitants”, details the general director of Mountain and Coastal Policies, Roser Bombardó. This means including 144 municipalities, which occupy 28% of the surface of Catalonia and which contribute 2% of the population, compared to the 300 in the 2017 document.
Eva Viñolas, mayoress of Susqueda, believes that “we should not talk about counties, but about zones”, and incorporate the municipalities of Montseny, Les Guilleries, Ports de Beseit or La Garrotxa, which are expected to be left out. Viñolas cites Susqueda as an example, with three centers at more than 800 meters of altitude and with less than 50 inhabitants each, but which is not included in the register drawn up by Territory. While waiting to know the details of the preliminary project, Viñolas, from the Junta de Micropobles, wonders if it is appropriate to create more structures instead of reinforcing and providing more resources to those already there, referring to the aforementioned technical office, the location of which has yet to be decided, according to Bombardó. In La Seu d’Urgell, the territorial services of the Department of Territory currently operate there.
David Verge, mayor of Planoles, a town with just over 300 inhabitants in Ripollès, applauds that the law is being pushed forward, but demands diligence and also questions that more structures are put in place. “Now, what is urgent is to have more housing. If we generate economic activity and workers arrive, where will they sleep?”, he asks.
On April 3, the Government presented the Strategy for the Pyrenees, which must be specified in an action plan for the period 2024-2030, and which proposes to reach the nearly 2,700 flats intended for social policies by 2042. Another of the tools to combat depopulation is the statute of rural municipalities, the preliminary draft of which was published in the DOGC on December 21, giving way to the period to present allegations. The aim is for them to have special treatment in the future regulations of all the departments of the Generalitat.
The small towns, far from the cities where there are more services and facing the challenge of reversing the loss of population, hope that all the initiatives announced will materialize.
The future high mountain law also foresees reformulating the General Mountain Council with the approval of a new regulation to move towards a governance more rooted in the territory.
