Experiences of social participation in recovery to reconnect a community to its heritage

Abstract

Intervention in private vernacular heritages often causes of the loss of its cultural values in the same way as its abandonment brings it to a condition of irreversible ruin. This reflection is valid for public heritage, but in this sphere the detachment caused by ignorance, forgetfulness and contempt, contrasting with the very idea of heritage, seems to be more serious. This work starts from the reflection on the degradation of certain historical-cultural resources due fundamentally to the lack of maintenance and abandonment, leading to a strategy based on social participation as a key to success in the recovery of heritage in general. The proposal is born from the analysis of the successful intervention experiences of different assets which from the beginning have incorporated the direct and active participation of the respective communities, not only in the enhancement of the assets once they have been intervened, but also in the physical process of the intervention through craftsmanship based on the traditional trades of construction. In both cases presented in this study direct participation has allowed the traditional construction techniques and their associated cultural values to become known, to train the population in techniques to guarantee the maintenance of heritage resources in the future, to recover traditions, ethnographic culture and local history, and finally to rebuild the broken links of attachment to the cultural heritage.