The Emerging Mountain Imaginary of the Galician Highlands: A New National Landscape in an Era of Globalization?

Abstract

Mountains have been the object of an intense elaboration of national imaginaries. There is a widespread perception of Galicia as a rural and coastal country based on agricultural and seaside landscapes, with mountains being largely ignored. However, a production of local narratives around the Trevinca Massif has recently taken place, which has become quite widespread, with an emerging mountain landscape imaginary of its own around the notion of the Galician Highlands. This paper discusses these developments in the context of both the changing imaginaries of mountains in Western cultures and the different Galician landscape imaginaries. The research was carried out by means of semistructured interviewing, leading toward obtaining three narratives elaborated from semiotic clustering. These results allow us to infer that global forces, in particular tourism and promotion, have been essential for explaining the emergence and spread of the Galician Highlands as a socio-spatial imaginary. Another conclusion is the relevance of the disputed conception of “natural borders” coinciding with mountains in the case-study area.