INHABIT THE RUIN: Insights on regeneration of depopulated villages in the Altoaragonese Pyrenees. Intervention strategies for transformation and revival of architectural and immaterial legacy.

Sobrepuerto is a territory at the Spanish Pyrenees which was entirely depopulated in the 1960s due to remoteness, socio-economic outdate and devastating national territorial policies, causing a fast transformation of the landscape, and generating problems of heritage preservation, territorial management and memory loss.

However, regeneration of nature and growth of urban population interest about countryside has triggered the emergence of novel activities linked to nature. Place attachment, awareness of historical value and strong identity of vernacular architecture induced diverse agents to develop different kinds of small-scale recovery and preservation interventions for some of these ruined villages which are progressively disappearing, and their cultural landscape, during last decades.

This research explores the strategies developed to preserve and promote the new cultural landscape, where nature and human traces overlap, and the effects which these initiatives have in the territory, reactivating it.

The investigation develops a comparative case-study of three interventions in built heritage (reconstruction/transformation - consolidation - deconstruction) in relation to other ongoing dynamics and the opportunities offered by the territory. It is conducted through graphical analysis of the spatial-programmatic transformation of these places at different scales, combined with narratives of users involved in this process.  

This study generates innovative knowledge about the significance of heritage (architectural-natural-cultural) in this transformed landscape for the involved agents, enabling to propose alternative strategies to manage it and to develop a sustainable and efficient future planning for depopulated areas.

KEYWORDS: adaptation of vernacular architecture; transformed landscape; small-scale intervention; design strategies; (re)inhabit.