La senda minera o cómo conectar historia, patrimonio y desarrollo rural

Abstract

Mining activity has capitalized on the historical image of Bierzo and Laciana during the last century. It was the engine of its expansion and economic development that has forged its social reality for decades and conditioned the current one. The vestiges that exist today of this mining and industrial activity are presented as one of the contemporary historical references of the Bierzo and Laciana, perhaps the most important and, without a doubt, should be considered as one of the essential elements of their collective identity and, in Consequently, collective heritage capable of being preserved and valued. This heritage is presented as an integral value of the territory, a nexus between the different originated landscapes that, uniting the industrial and the natural, are identified in El Bierzo and Laciana, being able to establish points of contact that can form a coherent discourse with a solid base historical, cultural and, above all, in current terms, integrating from a social and economic perspective, of all the space delimited by the mining activity in the area. Among the lines of action that can be developed by combining the elements mentioned, is to build a route that unites all the mining municipalities of these regions, identifying their individual heritage resources, highlighting their singularities so that a network can be formed that connect all the poles, complementary to each other. In this way, all the resources, without overlapping, could be incorporated into La Senda Minera, a project that includes two key ideas: that of advancement and progress (route, path, path) and that of a mining, that of coal and that of iron, which reminds us of recent history and is projected, patrimonially, into the future as the basis for the development of especially disadvantaged territories and attacked by crisis and depopulation.