The Natural Monument and Cultural Space of Las Médulas (León), seriously damaged by the fires that Castilla y León have devastated this summer, has expired since 2022 the Natural Resources Planning Plan (PORN), mandatory according to the Board, and lacks the guiding program for use and management (PRUG), also required by autonomous law. This World Heritage set, managed by the Autonomous Administration through the Natural Heritage Foundation, of the Environment Area and the Las Médulas Foundation, of the Ministry of Culture, implies the municipalities of Carucedo, Borrennes and Puente de Domingo Flórez. These locations are included in autonomous lists of fire risk and forced to have specific prevention plans. Only Carucedo, and in process, he has advanced on it, he revealed elDiario.es.
The lack of PORN update hinders, according to experts, that prevention or fire management measures can be applied, practically non -existent in the defeated plan, approved in 2002. The only mention to the fire in the expired plan is presented as follows: “Develop the necessary measures for the prevention and extinction of forest fires inside the natural space, ensuring that preventive actions minimize their landscape impact”. As a complement, he adds that “silvicultural actions that improve the regeneration of the tree vegetation of the natural space should be established as a result of the processes of abandonment of the agricultural activity”. Several neighbors and firefighters have denounced that the forest mass of Las Médulas, a landscape of great singularity, product of the exploitation of Roman gold mines, was neglected. The Board has not answered the questions of this newspaper.
The Autonomous Law of Natural Heritage 4/2015 marks that protected natural spaces must possess a PORN and a PRUG, as well as national parks, according to Law 42/2007. The Médulas Planning plan expired in 2022 and has not been renewed despite the fact that the standard orders to update it every 20 years. A natural heritage extrabajador explains that it is “necessary that they have these plans because it is what makes a natural space natural space, it has relatively open guidelines and regulations because it lasts 20 years.”
The PRUGs are “more precise and regulate every five years” and help manage closely, but in Castilla y León there is no. ” Sigh: “Everything is in the law. It would only have to be fulfilled. ”The president, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (PP), has announced a reconstruction so that the medulla recover“ their splendor ”and has promised that they will be“ equal to or better than a few months ago ”despite the fact that trees have been lost from decades.
This legislative inaction weakens Los Médulas, recognized by UNESCO since 1997, says Alfonso Fernández-Manso, a professor of agroforestry engineering at the University of León: “It should be protected by a preservation strategy that combines archaeological conservation, public use management and emergency prevention.” “The expiration of the Porn and the absence of PRUG does not invalidate the legal protection of space as a natural monument and heritage of humanity, but weakens the management capacity, slow down the response and open a front of legal and administrative insecurity worrying at a critical moment after the fire,” says the expert on these Roman gold mines, whose deposits have been saved although their environment has been saved.
“The lack of an updated PORN places management decisions in a normative limbo, where each measure lacks the support granted by a planned and current framework,” says Fernández-Manso. This “generates administrative uncertainty and makes it difficult to justify urgent restoration actions in the ecological and the heritage, where the cultural and archaeological landscape requires a rapid and grounded intervention.”
Las Médulas are distributed between Carucedo (PSOE), Borrenes and Puente de Domingo Flórez (PP). All appear in the Infocal (Autonomic Fire Management Plan), so due to their high risk of fire they must have their own plan against the flames. Estimates suggest that some 2,000 hectares of the protected place have been burned, two thirds of the total, without any people having that prepared regulation. Only Carucedo, as revealed elDiario.eshe commissioned in July to receive it in December a “Technical Plan for the Prevention and Fight against Forest Fire and Catastrophes derived from Climate Change” although the Board denied Unesco in 2022 that climate change was “relevant” on the medulla. Fernández-Manso Zanja: “The regulatory model was breached in the autonomic and local and left the medulla in extreme vulnerability in front of the fire, a patrimonial and natural catastrophe.” The Environment Prosecutor’s Office, he remembers, will study that lack of local regulations.
The set still burned when several positions of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) issued a tribune alerting that by the damage the UNESCO could “include the medulla in the list of heritage in danger, prior step for its declassification if urgent measures are not taken.” “Recovery should be governed by UNESCO recommendations,” they suggest. Castilla y León has already announced that he will request that this special category be preserved.
Javier Madrigal, CSIC specialist in fires, says that the Board has only contacted them “to assess damage and not to know why the fire, management and final decision have entered, we will send them recommendations.” “Climate change and territory management make high intensity fires and it seems that it will be worse,” he appreciates, but we must include more aspects: “The key is the self -protection and management of the vegetation, we must agree on what is needed, being a place protected by UNESCO you have to be very careful.” Madrigal admits that on the heritage zone of the mines “you have to do almost plant surgery or do nothing, but proper management of the environment.”
