© P. Duran
One of the causes of the current crisis has been our land management, heir to the building boom of the sixties and seventies. This footprint can still be seen in much of our landscape, and reminds us that it is necessary to take a path towards a new culture of sustainable spatial planning and away from the excesses of the past.
The site of Tudela (above), at Cap de Creus (Girona), regained its original landscape last summer. For over forty years this area had been occupied by the Club Mediterranée, a tourist resort in which the visitors had enjoyed the privilege of a natural area as a tourist destination. After months of hard work and expense, during which the manual demolition of 443 buildings was carried out, this natural reserve has regained its original landscape.
© J. Monfort
In the Albufera Natural Park in Valencia, in El Saler, there are still remains of what was intended as a large urban development, also dating from the sixties, as seen in the pictures below. The apartment towers survive amid a natural setting (above). We have speculated what it would be like if these buildings were to disappear, recovering El Saler landscape, as done at Cap de Creus (below).
