Punta Nati cultural landscape
Author: A. Roca
Menorca’s landscape is criss-crossed by a dense grid of drystone walls, perfectly integrated into the environment. It is a humanised landscape, modified over time by human activity that has respected the harmony of nature.
Through these walls, thousands of hands bring a society’s secrets to light, revealing a way of living and working, admirable knowledge, a rich vocabulary and profound love for the earth.
Punta Nati, on the island’s northern coast, is defined as Menorca’s most emblematic cultural landscape due to the concentration and quality of of its ethnological and archaeological features. So it is the example that identifies the essence of island culture itself.
Cultural landscapes are cultural assets representing the “combined works of nature and of man. They are illustrative of the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social, economic and cultural forces, both external and internal.”
(UNESCO, WHC, 2008: 47).
The cultural landscape is the result of the interaction between people and their environment over time, the expression of which is a territory perceived and valued for its cultural qualities, the product of a process and support for a community identity.
(Spanish National Cultural Landscape Plan, 2012)
