Landscapes of northern Spain and pastoral systems

Abstract

The Cantabrian mountain range and the Pyrenees will be analysed, using transects describing the principal types of vegetation, and showing the climatic contrast between an oceanic climate with more than 1200 mm of annual rainfall on the northern slopes and a continental-Mediterranean climate becoming progressively drier southwards.

In Asturias the assistance from the EU for the use of communal pastures is very important. Through this, help is granted to farmers using the communal pastures of the National Park of Picos de Europa. The objective is to maintain the grazing traditions practised in the past and to allow the development of land use systems compatible with the environment, while at the same time improving the use of the hills in the face of an increase of scrubland, which causes serious fires.

Intensive livestock farming, the industrial fatteners, and specialized livestock production based on a mix of tillage and grassland had very harmful effects: for the conservation of biodiversity, the ecologicaluse of extensive grazing lands, the upkeep of the “brañas”, the mountain landscape, the rural architecture, the indigenous breeds and the age-old shepherding culture.

In the Pyrenees we analyse recent changes in land use. A new demographic structure and decrease in population together led to the redevelopment of new management systems: a decrease in the cultivated area, the decline in cereal production and an increase in meadows, and the decline of sheep and expansion of cattle raising.