Landscape and image: heritage and form in the cultural construction of agrarian land

The history of rural areas gives rise, as a result of interaction between residents and the environment, to a dense network of permanencies, distributed along a scale ranging from the domestic to the territorial. This amounts to forms unfolding as landscape, both in terms of significant image and living heritage. Three municipalities in the Western Spanish Meseta are analyzed with the help of images, historical records and local enquiries. The cases selected show in different degrees the influence of land consolidation policies. The agrarian system, at the territorial, urban and architectonic scales, is scanned in search of the key elements of landscape character. Different tools are combined: direct questionnaires, archival research and a reflective form-interpretation by means of drawing, as well as advanced land mapping and photographing. The outcomes are a taxonomy of evolutive responses to land use, an array of detected landscape values and the determination of landscape character, leading to innovative proposals for rural land planning policy.