The MAGNA project has already had a lot to say, for the last time in 2014. However, the processing of the work was reactivated as of 2020, and in recent months the proposal for declaring the project as a Sectoral Project of Supramunicipal Incidence (PSIS) has been presented in the Parliament of Navarra.

The quarry would have an area of 100 hectares in the natural space of Mount Aldude. This area is declared a Special Conservation Area within the Natura 2000 Network promoted by the European Union. In addition to its obvious ecological value, the area has a rich cultural heritage that has been used for centuries as a livestock area.

Complicated history

The place called Erdiz or Erdizaga is located inside the massif of the Erregerena, on the border of the valleys of Baztán and Steribar (Alto Navarra). As its name suggests, the area was configured as a real property zone in the Middle Ages. In the territorial structure of the Old Regime, mountain areas were often defined as communal property of one or more communities, with local neighbors having the right to exploit their resources: fodder areas, chestnuts, ferns, etc. However, being the property of the Crown spaces such as the King (Aldude/Quintoa, Urbasa, Andía, Entzia, Bardenas, etc. ), they constituted distinct territorial units whose exploitation was carried out in accordance with specific regulations.

The historical research requested by the Baztan City Hall has shown that the Crown sold Mount Erregerena to a private individual in the early sixteenth century. After several sales operations, the area ended up in the hands of the lords of Góngora, but in 1775 it moved back to the Hacienda Real. However, the area maintained two peculiarities throughout these centuries. On the one hand, it continued to be outside the territories of Baztan and Steribar, forming a separate unit. On the other hand, and following an old habit, Baztan’s neighbours were given the right to bring their animals to eat there, as long as they returned to the valley at night.

The situation changed after the First Carlist War. In 1841, the Concerted Law led to the abolition of the Fuero de Navarra, in a context in which the real-estate forests were brought under the control of the State, which took (brought) a series of measures to ‘rationalize’ their management, in accordance with the legal and economic principles of liberalism. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, this situation triggered a conflict between the municipalities of the Baztan Valley and Steribar, to whom the territory would remain. These conflicts and doubts have been resolved in 2018 by a law of the Parliament of Navarra, but have not yet been resolved. In this context, the quarry's construction project has once again brought back the dust.

A mountain cultural landscape

The livestock use maintained for centuries has been the main factor that has influenced the evolution of the landscape of Erdiz. Protected between the surrounding mountains, the Erdiz Creek forms a small valley in which, thanks to the Foehn effect and the high water flow, the area is always wet, providing abundant pasture for cattle, the best grassland of Baztan.

In fact, the center of the valley forms a jungle, unique spaces for the collection of cattle grazing on the mountain, widely spread since remote times in the Basque mountains. In a roundabout delimited with white hawthorn, in Erdiz, several material elements linked to livestock and traditional forestry can be distinguished: traces of three bords of different times, corridors, old cubes cultivated to protect and feed animals, areas of anger, as well as moving trees, chestnuts and beech trees in particular. On the surrounding slopes grasslands and argomals are interspersed to feed livestock extensively throughout the day.

All these elements are clearly related to the management practices of the mountains to which both file records and oral sources refer. From the Middle Ages, these same practices, and the associated ecological knowledge, transmitted from generation to generation. have been the ones that have modeled and maintained the mountain landscapes of the Baztan, until they give their characteristic character.

In addition, Erdiz has a special value among the population of the Baztan Valley due to its location and climate. This peculiarity has become evident in the aridity that has affected the whole of Navarre during the summer of 2022. In fact, the cattle of Andía, Urbasa and the rest of the places are forced to feed winter at the end of the summer. Those in Erdizen, on the contrary, have had fresh fodder, as the ttip valley has remained moist and green, and it is a field of action that has shown great resilience to climate change.

Live livestock

In addition, areas such as Erdiz have an added value compared to other mountain areas, which is the living cultural heritage. In fact, the mountainous areas of the Baztan have so far maintained, with the vicissitudes of the time, the livestock and forestry uses inherited from the past centuries. Unlike Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, the expansion of monospecific plantations derived from industrialization has not reached this point, and its landscape has maintained its organic evolution to a greater extent, although we cannot forget the new problems and challenges posed by the tertiarization of the last decades.

Therefore, the Erdiz quarry project would not occupy an empty ‘natural’ space. Its landscape, in addition to a rich ecological environment, is an heir to a tangible and intangible cultural heritage that once destroyed would be impossible to restore. The possible rupture of this chain also explains, therefore, the anguish that the project has caused in the valley population. However, the future of popular mobilization and the Erdiz pastures that have emerged to respond to it is not written.