The Secretary General for Territory and Biodiversity of the Ministry of the Environment, Antonio Serrano, today inaugurated the V Meeting of the Workshops for the application of the European Landscape Convention, which will be held on the 28th and 29th of this year in Girona.

The opening ceremony was also attended by Oriol Nel.lo, Secretary of Territorial Planning of the Generalitat of Catalonia; Anna Pagans, mayor of Girona; Maguelonne Dejeant-Pons, Head of the Spatial and Landscape Planning Division of the Council of Europe; Enrico Buergi, President of the Conference of the European Landscape Convention; Valery Sudarenkov, member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; Giovani Di Stasi, former president of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, and Joan Nogué, director of the Landscape Observatory of Catalonia.

The European Landscape Convention, launched in 2000 and in force since 2004, is an international treaty whose objective is to promote the protection, management and planning of landscapes, as well as to organise European cooperation in this field. For the signatory countries, it means assuming responsibility on the part of the public administrations in the consideration and attention to the landscape for its social, environmental, cultural and economic interest for the whole of the European continent and especially for Spain for its richness and great landscape diversity.

The Ministry of the Environment has been promoting different initiatives over the last two years to achieve the consideration of the landscape from the innovative criteria of the European Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe, the ratification by our country of the aforementioned Convention and the collaboration with the Autonomous Communities to implement operational landscape policies.

The new laws in preparation (water, natural heritage and biodiversity, national parks, sustainable rural development) and the coastal policy, the A.G.U.A. Programme or the future Strategic Plan for Natural Heritage and Biodiversity clearly and precisely integrate the basic principles of this landscape policy defended by the European Landscape Convention.