VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

Sierra Nevada National Park, southern Spain, offers a wide network of shelters of all kinds in its more than 85,000 hectares: guards, free and natural shelters, or bivouacs, as well as other constructions and infrastructures related to agricultural, forestry or livestock activity converted into places of refuge. Many of these constructions have been part of this unique mountain landscape for centuries. These elements face the passage of time and the harsh winter conditions and are in different states of conservation, facing the danger of abandonment and ruin. Their landscape and heritage character, legacy of shepherds, farmers and stockbreeders who for centuries inhabited the high mountains, makes it necessary to catalogue and inventory these architectural constructions in a contemporary manner. Bivouac and natural shelters are unique and characteristic constructions in terms of architectural heritage, as well as being unprotected from abandonment and possible disappearance. The inventory aims to produce contemporary cartographies by processing metadata captured by point cloud and parametric sensing. The transfer of all this data provides the public and the National Park’s conservation teams fundamental tools for the valorisation of these elements and future action plans. The objectives take the guidelines of the Sustainable Development Goals through the valuation of rural heritage as part of the sustainable socio-economic development of an area of special environmental sensitivity.