The municipalities are waiting to see how the preliminary draft of the new high mountain law is finalized, which the Territori department of the Generalitat has announced that it will have ready in March for public exhibition. The proposal comes 41 years after the first regulation designed to give a boost to the most remote and unpopulated areas of Catalonia. The working document proposes creating the Alta Muntanya Technical Office with the mission of developing a six-year strategic action plan with multi-year financing that has a supra-municipal impact.
From the Associació de Micropobles de Catalunya they regret that this initiative to boost the mountain areas has taken so long, but they celebrate that finally, entering the last year of the current legislature, the intention to activate it and advance in the challenge of territorial balance. It should be remembered that the process to reformulate the 1983 law started in 2011; in 2017, the previous Government forged a document that remained in the drawer. Territory now proposes to incorporate as high mountain enclaves the counties of Berguedà, Solsonès, Pallars Jussà, Pallars Sobirà, Alta Ribagorça, Cerdanya, Ripollès and Val d'Aran, leaving out Garrotxa and other areas that were included in the previous proposal. "We have considered physical criteria, that the region has more than 60% of its surface at more than 700 meters of altitude and that the average slope is greater than 30%, and also demographic, that more than 40% of the population centers are more than 750 meters and have less than 50 inhabitants", explains the general director of Mountain and Coastal Policies, Roser Bombardó. This means including 144 municipalities, which occupy 28% of the surface of Catalonia and which contribute 2% of the population, compared to the 300 in the 2017 document.
Eva Viñolas, mayor of Susqueda, believes that "we should not talk about counties but about zones" and incorporate the municipalities of Montseny, Las Guilleries, Ports de Beseit or La Garrotxa, which are expected to be left out. Viñolas puts Susqueda as an example, with its three centers at more than 800 meters of altitude and with less than 50 inhabitants each, but which is not included in the register prepared by Territory. While waiting to know the detailed draft, Viñolas, from the board of Micropobles, wonders if it is appropriate to create more structures instead of reinforcing and providing more resources to the existing ones in reference to the aforementioned technical office, whose location is still unknown decide, according to Bombardó. In La Seu d'Urgell, the territorial services of the Department of Territory currently operate.
David Verge, mayor of Planoles, a town with just over 300 inhabitants of Ripollès, applauds the desire to move forward with the law but demands diligence and also questions the implementation of more structures. “Now, what is urgent is to have more housing. “If we generate economic activity and workers arrive, where will they sleep?” he asks.
On April 3, the Government presented the Pirineu Strategy, which must be specified in an action plan for the period 2024-2030, and which proposes reaching nearly 2,700 apartments destined for social policies in 2042. Another of the tools To combat depopulation is the statute of rural municipalities, the preliminary draft of which was published in the DOGC on December 21, giving way to the period to present allegations. The objective is that they have special treatment in the future regulations of all the departments of the Generalitat.
Small towns, far from cities where there are more services and facing the challenge of reversing population loss, hope that all the announced initiatives will materialize.
The future high mountain law also contemplates reformulating the General Council of Muntanya by approving a new regulation to move towards governance more rooted in the territory.
