Cartography and Landscape of Agrarian Colonisation Villages in Spain during the 20th Century: Graphic Recording and Reconstruction of the Productive Territory, the Case of El Chaparral (Granada)

Abstract

The Spanish domestic colonisation of the 20th century was a major territorial management and planning project which followed a policy of recovering agricultural land and making it habitable, emulating different international innovative collective models for rural exploitation. In Spain, this led to the creation of approximately three hundred colonisation villages between 1939 and 1977 which, along with their landscapes, represented a comprehensive vision of land intervention, transformed following minimal energy criteria and making use of pre-existing elements and infrastructures. The proposals of this ambitious project already incorporated ideas which later formed the basis of the modern theories of ecological and landscape urbanism and geodesign. This paper presents cartographic research based on the reconstruction of the landscape before and after this operation, following an overlay-mapping methodology applied to the colonised area of El Chaparral (Granada), which provides an extraordinary overview of the territorial transformation process carried out at different scales. The work concludes that the success of the Spanish domestic colonisation model for comprehensive agrarian planning lies in its multiscale and multidisciplinary perspective, which was developed in continuity with and in a way that was respectful of the characteristics and elements of the landscape. For these main reasons, its approaches are valid for future agroecological developments, and the colonisation villages are a valuable model of rural habitability to be updated.