Consuming Space, Nature and Culture: Patrimonial Discussions in the Hyper-Modern Era

Abstract This paper reflects on what is called the process of ‘patrimonialization’ of culture and nature currently taking place in the Western mountainous inlands of the Spanish Eastern Pyrenees. Landscapes, as cultural and historical formations, are presently being commodified and connected to global networks of consumption dominated by urban and ‘postmaterialistic’ values. Conservation policies, ski resorts and cultural museums are mushrooming in previously ‘abandoned’ agricultural fields or vacated factories. This shift from agriculture, ranching and industry, to conservation and services marks the connection of the Pyrenean valleys to global modernity and to the hyper-modern era. These processes of transformation have been depicted generally as structural processes of unilateral redefinition of the urban–rural divide: redefinition that results in direct urban appropriation. Rural populations, however, are far from passive subjects of external influences. The analysis of local agency suggests a more complicated picture in which local economic and cultural choices are included as explanatory variables. The story of the connection of these spaces to regional and global networks is not only a story about local dispossession, but also about local ingenuity. The globalization of the economy in the early 1970s disempowered and relegated these areas to the periphery of the economic system. The consolidation of a global modernity articulated around the need to provide leisure has opened a venue for these areas to reconnect themselves to the central networks and to attract large amounts of resources from these urban-dominated economic systems.

256 I. Vaccaro & O. Beltran In addition, these areas have experienced the emergence of 'cultural museums'. Museums that describe the life, material culture of transhumant shepherds, charcoal miners, timber folk, river rafters, salt producers, textile workers and so on. This set of connections link these, often historically marginal, areas to the national or regional societies through networks governed by very specific sets of values closely associated with leisure and service economies. Most of these initiatives, parks, resorts and museums are arguably created for the use and contemplation of non-local visitors, tourists or ecotourists. The mountains' natural and cultural values are deemed worth protecting because at some point they are declared national or human patrimony. We call this process patrimonialization. They are patrimonialized. They are preserved because they are valuable not just to the local communities but the national society at large. This value shifts, however, from value of direct use to intrinsic and contemplative values (Valdéz 2004).
Such a process necessarily has to result also in transformations in the way collective identity is constructed. Sense of place is not just contextualized locally but is built with a complex battery of places, individuals and concepts from several social and geographical scales (Agrawal & Sivaramakrishnan 2003). The network society has integrated the internal periphery of the Western urban world so that identity is the result of both attachment and friction (Castells 1996;Tsing 2004).
This paper analyses this contemporary process of transformation of mountainous rural areas from a perspective of a postmaterialistic redefinition of natural resources (Inglehart 1997) and a redirection of the demographic, economic and ideological flows associated with their management. Moreover, this reorganization of space, uses and resources is, more often than not, mediated by urban values and consumption. The tourists that consume nature, leisure and culture are predominantly non-locals coming from the cities (Cross 1993;Böröcz 1996).
This process of territorial appropriation and redefinition is especially interesting in an area and a type of natural resources in which common property has been and still is the dominant property regime. In the Catalan Pyrenean mountains, the historical transformations of the property structure, mostly a product of state policies, have preceded changes in productive practices, and have had an influence on the demographic patterns and the collective identity of the communities.
In the following discussion the first section ('Changing Mountains') examines the recent history of the Catalan Pyrenees to understand the social processes that set the stage for this post-materialistic appropriation. The second section ('Patrimonialization and Consumption') revisits the figures provided above in order to trigger further theoretical analysis of the observed process. The final section ('Hyper-modern Place Attachments') connects this process with local agency. This account consciously emphasizes territorial and jurisdictional transformations. The goal is to highlight how local actors have positioned themselves in relation to these new opportunities in order to take advantage of them. Mountaineers are far from passive subjects of history.

Consuming Space, Nature and Culture 257
This article is meant to provide a broad overview by identifying, contextualizing and explaining a specific set of social trends currently affecting the Pyrenees. It is the result of a specific research project at the Pallars Sobirà, but also draws on the results of previous investigations elsewhere in the Pyrenees (Berguedà and Val d'Aran). The methods include a combination of intensive archival research and an array of ethnographic field methods, such as interviews, participant observation, and the interpretation of maps and aerial images among others.

Changing Mountains
Dramatic changes have occurred in the Catalan Pyrenees over the last two hundred years. Each valley and each corner of the range has its own history. Every district and every village has distinctive dynamics. Here, however, are offered some examples to characterize a general and complex process of social, economic and ecological transformation.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century most of the Pyrenean population still worked in agriculture and ranching. Most production was focused on subsistence and short-range trade. There were some notable exceptions of long distance networks involving iron and tools in the Ripollès, wool from the Berguedà to the Pallars Sobirà, and timber was rafted down the large north-western rivers, the Noguera Pallaresa and the Noguera Ribagorçana.
Communities, however, depended more on their own production than the potential capital generated by trade. This mode of production, present in the area since the early Middle Ages, fostered dispersed settlement patterns. The bottom of the valleys, with their little flat areas suitable for the practice of agriculture and higher potential for connectivity with the lowlands, had the major settlements. The ranges, nevertheless, were packed with small villages, hamlets and isolated farms. The pre-industrialization Pyrenean landscape was alive and, in relative terms, densely populated.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the final decline of many of these communities began. The modern Spanish state emerged during the second decade of the century. To achieve modern efficiency, officials in charge of restructuring the administrative structure of the country decided to follow a series of rational and standardized criteria, such as minimum demographic size, connectivity to markets and economic viability. Only the communities that complied with those criteria could reach the status of municipality. And only communities that became municipalities were entitled to public services. This was the first large wave of territorialization policies issued by the modern Spanish state (Hannah 2000;Peluso & Vandergeist 2001;Braun 2002). Most little communities hanging near the top of the ranges and near the mountain passes failed to achieve this legal status. At that point in history, trade was no longer circulating through the paths that crossed the mountain passes. By then, most fluxes were following the network of roads that were being built along the rivers in the main valleys. Communication shifted from a transversal directionality, from valley to valley, to a set of vertical axes following the main valleys flowing south to the lowlands and, ultimately, the cities. The inhabitants of the farms and villages of the slopes were forced more than ever to go down to the valleys. As they had no access or rights to public services they had to go often to the larger valley villages to buy supplies, to take children to school, to issue all kinds of legal permits, search for trading and marriage partners, and so on. Although there was no compulsory relocation, the incentives and costs were clearly there.
Nowadays, remnants of abandoned villages, crumbling farms, closed churches, neglected paths or pastures claimed by the forests are the silent witnesses of an era in which every little valley, every rock could be associated with a family or a community. Figures 1 and 2 depict the Valley of Lillet (Berguedà) as an example. The first map represents the network of paths historically used by the transhumant shepherds. Most of these paths are not used anymore. The map also shows several abandoned villages that lie at mid range. Finally, the third item included is the numerous churches of the area. Some, are still used, most are not. In any case, this map portrays a landscape in which every corner of the valley and the mountains is socialized and used intensively.
The second map illustrates the most salient social features of the landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The scattered but omnipresent local social activity Consuming Space, Nature and Culture 259 of the mountains has been replaced by protected areas, ski resorts and museums. The valley has been reconfigured to offer goods and services to visitors.
In the Pallars Sobirà the disbanding of villages following the initial modernization of the municipal structure of the Spanish state is even more striking. After 1842 at least thirty communities disappeared from the official censuses. This 'mortality' can only be compared with the sixteen losses that occurred due to an acceleration of depopulation during the 1970s. In the year 2005 the Pallars Sobira had only 15 municipalities ( Figure 3). The historical records of the last one hundred and fifty years, thus, talk about 108 villages and hamlets disappearing from the official censuses.
The Berguedà and the Pallars Sobirà represent the two extremes of the historical changes suffered by the Pyrenees. The former, or at least significant areas of it, was integrated into the industrial networks dominating the rest of the country. The latter, remained on the periphery, isolated, and the main changes sweeping across its valleys were focused on significant population losses in favour of the lowlands. In the Pallars Sobirà, lacking its own industrialization process, these losses started during the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The industry of the Berguedà slowed down the process of depopulation, in absolute terms, until the 1960s. There was no industrialization in the Pallars Sobirà and hydropower plants arrived there in a later period. The first dams were built during the 1950s. Although the dams brought jobs for a short time -during the construction period -this was a mirage that quickly vanished once the dams and the hydropower plants were finished (Tarraubella 1990;Boneta 2003).
Concurrently the state issued the next two waves of territorialization policies: the disentailment campaigns (1850-1900) and the expropriation campaign led by the forest engineer corps (1900-60) (cf. Gómez 1992;Vaccaro 2005). This is not the place for a detailed explanation of the scope and nature of both campaigns; suffice it to say that they translated into large patches of territory being appropriated by the state. In the first case of the disentailment campaign, the expropriations attempted to introduce theoretically non-productive lands into the real state market. Common property, abundant at the time in the Pyrenees was especially targeted. Non-private forms of property, in the eyes of nineteenth century liberals, were inefficient. In the second case the corps of engineers was given the authority to decide about the condition of the land. It was a time in which dozens, if not hundreds, of water reservoirs were being built downstream and there was a great deal of preoccupation with deforestation and erosion affecting the efficiency of the reservoirs. Following the recommendations of the forest engineers, thousands of hectares were expropriated. Traditional uses of the landscape were considered harmful and generators of erosion. The confiscated land from then on was enclosed, kept and managed by government institutions. The people that had lived and worked on farms on the expropriated patches had to relocate, often to the valley towns.
Gradually the slopes started to depopulate. Some villagers relocated because of the attraction of the re-emerging towns. Some relocated because the dwindling population of the ranches did not offer a viable critical mass for a healthy community anymore. The region, in absolute terms, did not lose population. On the contrary, the valleys in the process of industrialization received influxes of workers from the Catalan lowlands and beyond.
The decline of the Catalan textile industry, incapable of competing with Morocco or the Far East's low production costs, the replacement of hydropower by oil or nuclear-generated power, the closure of the mines overpowered by South Africa's coal and the 1970s global oil crises annihilated most of the industrial possibilities of the Pyrenees and large parts of the Western inlands. Globalization and its low shipping costs nullified every single productive advantage that the mountain communities could have ever had.
Suddenly, the already precarious Pyrenean job market crashed. The industrialized areas of the Pyrenees joined the depopulation trend that its marginal areas had started fifty years before. This time the migration did not stop at the towns and villages at the bottom of the valleys. People pushed forward to the urban areas. The area experienced an acute process of depopulation and aging. Figure 4 illustrates the demographic trends described above.
These socio-economic convulsions were not inconsequential for the environment of the Catalan mountains. Today, the old agricultural terraces still climb impossible slopes but not much is cultivated on them. The terraces are silent evidence of an era in which these mountains were densely inhabited and where agriculture and ranching were the main productive activities. These terraces penetrate deep into the forest. In other words, these forests were not present when these mountains were a functional agrarian landscape.
This widespread but low-intensity key anthropogenic influence on the ecology of the area was completely transformed by the eruption of industrialization. Open air mines, trains and dams dumped tons of concrete and pollution in these valleys. The impact of human economic activities jumped to a new level.
At the same time the depopulation trend that, during the industrial era started in the higher parts of the ranges but spread down during the deindustrialization, resulted in a reduction of human pressure on the environment. The forest started to recolonize long-abandoned fields, and charismatic species, due to natural processes or to reintroduction, returned to the mountains.
This situation prepared the stage for the next economic transformation of these mountains. The post-industrial Pyrenees are characterized by low density communities concentrated mainly in villages, mountains mainly devoid of permanent inhabitants, and exuberant and growing forests. These new characteristics attracted a new wave of territorialization policies -the fourth wave since the beginning of the nineteenth century and the emergence of the modern Spanish state: the generalized implementation of conservation areas. This is a region where the depopulation and consequent reduction of productive human pressure has allowed nature to recover or change, where the depopulation and the lack of alternatives guarantees low levels of social resistance and where the past territorialization policies perpetrated by the state have resulted in large pools of public land that can and have acted as territorial foundations of these policies.
The same characteristics facilitated the arrival of ski resorts. The survival of large tracks of communal or municipal land on the slopes seems to have made possible the consolidation of these large projects. The process of depopulation of the high valleys has resulted also in the drastic reduction of commoners. Due to the low number of owners, current decision-making processes in communal areas closely resemble those of private property. Land speculation on account of the potential and highly rewarding new uses has become a common activity for commoners, local councils and local and Consuming Space, Nature and Culture 263 external investors. The extreme atomization of private property characteristic of the agricultural lowlands would have been a significant obstacle to any project requiring the acquiescence of numerous owners.
Adventure and ski tourism have resulted in a social revival of many of these areas. The relative demographic recovery observed over the last ten years in some of the Pyrenean districts can be related to this economic transformation (see Figure 4). The service industry generates significant revenue in terms of wages and benefits from land speculation. It is questionable, however, if the economic benefits are distributed fairly across mountain communities and if they compensate for long-term damage to the social and ecological fabric. Local communities are far from homogeneous in their approach to these particular economic opportunities. Tourism activities depend to a large extent on alliances with external sources of funding and public institutions (Hall 1994;Lindberg & Enriquez 1994;Haenn 2005). Some communities have successfully maintained complete control of the emerging tourism industry, while urban-based corporations have come to dominate this form of development in other areas. Still other valleys remain largely unexploited.
History has always been about fluxes. There is not, and there never was, an idyllic Pyrenean landscape exclusively characterized by isolation, harmony and complete self-sufficiency. However, in the globalized urban era the patterns of production, marketing and consumption have emerged in tight association with the infrastructure networks that canalize the demographic, informational and material fluxes that feed the cities on a daily basis.
It was the emergence of these networks that destroyed every possible competitive advantage of mountain industrialization. The early industrialization process did affect the inland mountains. The relationship between mountains and cities was marked by extractive practices. The engineers of relatively new technical universities were sent all over the countryside to identify sources of natural resources susceptible to nourishing the progress of the industrial revolution. As mentioned earlier, the Pyrenees provided coal and hydropower for this process. Coal extraction and hydropower resulted in high-impact infrastructures distorting the traditional mountainous landscape. This extractive process can also be described in terms of unilineal fluxes of matter and energy from the countryside to the cities. The essential separation, however, remained. The urban society constructed outposts in the higher valleys of the High Pyrenees in order to extract the energy for fuel. Citizens and factories in the lowlands consumed this flux of energy without entering into direct contact with the source. The consumption process, thus, affected raw or transformed materials transported to the lowlands.
This transformation did not leave the social fabric of mountains and valleys indifferent. The construction of infrastructures, the monetization of economy and the opening of jobs, concentrated the population of the area in the towns of the valleys, it transformed their productive identity by starting the process of proletarianization of the mountain populations. It created incentives for a directed demographic flux that Source: Campillo and Font (2004).
emptied the slopes. Voided of social pressure, the forest started to claim fields and terraces.
The post-materialistic transformation of the Pyrenees that occurred in the last thirty years has changed this relationship between mountains and cities. The implementation of protected areas and ski resorts affects space more than specific resources. It consequently resulted in territorial appropriation and urbanization of the landscape for consumptive purposes. Public and private initiatives compete for the best areas of the mountains. The goal may be conservation or speculation, but in both cases territory is set apart for new uses and local development ensues. The newly perceived beauty of the High Pyrenees, combined with the improvement of infrastructures and the creation of tourist attractions, such as parks and ski resorts, has resulted in a spectacular development of the processes of urbanization of the territory (Table 2).
New residences are built and old ones are refurbished to provide secondary homes to city dwellers. These homes, used during weekends or short periods during the summer holidays, remain empty throughout most of the year. In some cases, small villages become ghost communities for all but a few months of the year. For instance, Aineto, a little village of around twenty houses, has only two houses that are occupied permanently. Residents have moved the village party from the traditional date in September to an alternative time during August, the only moment of the year when the village has enough people to celebrate. On the other hand, apartment buildings surround towns such as Sort or Esterri d'Aneu. These nucleuses are developing their own urban sprawl. The apartments, however, remain closed most of the year.
The territory was literally dumped into the market where it has to compete with other areas offering the same product: leisure. This process of commoditization depends on the virtual insertion of the marketed rural areas into the urban imaginary through publicity and media (information bytes). Values and attractiveness are convened through images and words in schools, TV programmes and media in general. The territory becomes, so to speak, a flow of information that connects product and potential consumers.

Consuming Space, Nature and Culture 265
The next step is composed of seasonal flows of urban consumers temporarily visiting the area. The consumption of the rural space is then, the result of a double and opposite, flow: information and people. Although the increase in the tourism industry has provided an increase in local jobs that have helped to keep some youth in the area, second home owners, skiers and tourists, in general, do not contribute on a regular basis to reanimate the social vitality of the local communities. Small villages dominated by the second residence phenomenon are empty during most of the week or even the year. Second residence owners do not contribute to the demographic potential or the daily social life of these villages, which are mainly characterized by empty houses and an aging population (Butler 1994).
In addition, the implementation and management of protected areas and ski resorts cannot happen without the investment of large amounts of money. This money, in general, does not come from local sources. So, this re-territorialization cannot start without significant influxes of cash. This 'investment dependence' results also in a certain local disempowerment.
In sum, it has always been about fluxes but the post-industrial mountains present a differential element. This distinction is mainly about the type of relationship that links lowlands and mountains. Nowadays this relationship is based on territorial appropriation and transformation. It is not about isolated extraction operations anymore but about urbanization.

Patrimonialization and Consumption
Natural resources have been historically exploited at intense degrees. Nowadays, however, the differences reside on the conditions of use and the intensity and range of flow circulation. Space is radically reinvented to become natural patrimony or space for leisure. These new uses translate into the symbolic, economic and juridical re-qualification of the territory.
Interestingly enough, these new uses imply a specific type of non-local actors. Conservation policies, generally, are declared and sustained by the state. Ski resorts, with their enormous initial investments, are usually out of local communities' possibilities. Ski resorts, consequently, imply the disembarkment of some type of corporation or consortium. Ski resorts, however, tend to search for and work in local alliances with some sort of local elite. In both cases, then, space is appropriated by large external institutions.
These appropriations are directed at securing important resources: singular nature and potential for leisure. It can be argued that the motivation behind the two types of appropriation is radically distinct. Conservation policies are designed to protect biodiversity, while ski resorts are designed to make money. Furthermore, ski resorts, collaterally, degrade biodiversity. They share, none the less, a few common traits: (1) they require a large amount of space; (2) they are designed and managed by external institutions; (3) local traditional uses are excluded or regulated tightly; (4) they imply substantial alterations of the property regimes in place; (5) the potential consumers, as skiers or visitors, are mostly outsiders; (6) in both cases nature is commoditized as a place for fun or as natural patrimony.
Conservation areas are more than ecological necessities. They are political processes of appropriation of territory and resources. And they are also scientific experiments of ecological engineering. In making this point it is not the intention to deny the need for conservation policies, rather to highlight its 'other' aspects.
The creation of a park or a reserve entails the creation of new limits, of new jurisdictional lines over the territory. The area circumscribed by these lines is transformed immediately. The rights and duties associated with ownership are altered by the new regulations associated with the new jurisdictions. This is, then, a political process (Anderson & Grove 1987;Stonich 2000).
A protected area is a political process that either tries to protect a specific type of environment or to restore another. Nature, however, is in permanent dynamic, unstable change (Scoones 1999;Abel & Stepp 2003). Conservation, in many cases, thus requires freezing an ecological situation or a transformation to another. In both cases this relates to ecological engineering.
In a protected area of the Catalan Pyrenees, the management decides to exterminate the wild goat, introduced by accident and for sport hunting thirty years ago. It may compete with local species. The marmot (Marmota marmota), also a foreign species recently settled in the Pyrenees, is allowed to thrive because it fills a theoretically unused niche in the area. The same management team reinforces the previous, also accidental and also for hunting purposes, introduction of red deer with new releases. The explanation is simple. Historically, red deer (Cervus elaphus) was present in the area a couple of centuries ago.
All these examples of ecosystem manipulation are real, and they are not related here as aberrations. They represent legitimate choices taken by conservation policy managers. These examples are here to illustrate the ecological malleability of any given landscape. It is hard, if not impossible, to agree on which is the perfect status of a set of ecosystems. Do we want as many charismatic species as possible? Do we want the carnivores too? Which period of the historical ecology of an area is the most desirable to recreate? Is the most desirable period, in terms of biodiversity richness, compatible with the current degree of human occupation and human use of the landscape?
All the previous examples of ecological design choices and all preceding questions direct us to a specific point. Protected areas are examples of ecological engineering. This point does not subtract value from their existence and activities, but it identifies one of their main characteristics. Their goal is to manage, intervene and change if necessary, a landscape.
To proceed to an effective management of the landscape under their jurisdiction it is necessary to make a quantification of the resources and an assessment of their localization. To maintain a protected landscape is to keep it stable in a desirable Consuming Space, Nature and Culture 267 condition. This need to freeze the ecological situation of a landscape, combined with the obligation of parks, as public policies, to divulgate, to communicate with their constituency, points to the concept of 'museization'. Protected areas guard collective natural patrimony and this heritage is displayed to visitors. Nature is translated into brochures, guided hikes or exhibitions. Nature is translated into culture and communicated via pedagogical tools perfected in museums. Nature, in other words, is managed at several levels. Protected areas, like museums, display culture and patrimony to societies (Whelan 1991;King & Steward 1996;Honey 1999). Ecotourism emerges as a developmental tool that may provide legitimacy to the conservation process (Boo 1990;Bandy 1996;Haenn 2005).
These open air museums, occupying the top of the ranges, have their counterparts at the bottom of the valleys. It is there, in the towns, where one encounters cultural museums. These cultural museums display the traditional and not so traditional ways of life for the visitor. Tools, clothes, housing, habits and traditions are gathered and explained for the visitors. In general they depict an ideal image of a specific type of individual: herders, miners, rafters and so on (Cohen 1988;Harkin 1995). Daily life and tradition are integrated as patrimony into another museistic institution. A coherent and, in general, homogenizing version of the past is constructed and communicated to tourists (Howell 1994;Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). This process of reconstructing and re-enacting the past, both real and imagined, often places limits on local behaviour and agency. Local councils, for instance, issue building regulations that force new construction to follow so-called traditional styles. Locals have to negotiate new regulations that attempt to harmonize culture, nature and tourism. Villages are supposed to look traditional and clean at the same time. This is not an easy endeavour when the traditional economy is based on herding and agriculture. Interestingly enough, those that practise traditional activities are more often than not at odds with 'traditionalizing' measures, which are meant to attract tourists and are encouraged by those locals that depend on tourism, not on traditional activities. The versions of history explained in local museums are also the result of political tensions and, ultimately, a compromise between historians, anthropologists (often folklorists), local communities, ideals and marketing needs (Prats 1997;Dicks 1999). These versions of history, nature and culture are the result of older and contemporary political negotiations between romantic views, economic rationales, local realities and institutional and individual dynamics (Urry 1990;Brown 1995;Darby 2000;Nogué & Vicente 2004). This version necessarily includes detailed explanations of the interactions between traditional societies and territory. In agricultural, pastoral or extractive societies human activities have obvious and direct anthropogenic effects on the territory. The environmental history of the Mediterranean mountains presents numerous examples of these anthropogenic activities (McNeill 1992;Grove & Rackham 2001). The territory becomes a landscape by virtue of the social inscriptions that result from human activities. These activities depict societies intensively attached to the local territory and nature. This fact, in contraposition to our dehumanized and denaturalized mall 268 I. Vaccaro & O. Beltran societies, paves the way for a naturalization of traditional societies. The organic food movement, for instance, often relies on the purity of the old ways and its traditional practices to justify the superiority of their products and, ultimately, their way of life. Way of life that often mimics an idealized version of the old ways.
Nature and culture become one at several levels. First, they are unified by their integration as necessary halves of a whole called landscape. Secondly, both of them achieve a historical legitimacy that turns nature into part of our culture, and traditional culture into part of our natural roots. And, thirdly, as a consequence of this historical legitimacy, both become collective heritage and, consequently, they get protected via museums and conservation policies. Nature is also harnessed by the expansion of the ski resorts in order to provide leisure (the culture of leisure). The three of them offer a product that the larger national society of consumers considers valuable and is eager to purchase (Crandall 1980;Urry 1990).
These valleys, somehow, become leisure theme parks. Their natures and their cultures are integrated by this process of museization of natural and cultural values, and of naturalization of so-called traditional culture. The places themselves, the valleys, become patrimony. Let us not forget, for instance that the Valley of Boi (Alta Ribagorça) has been declared, in its entirety, a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. What are its values but a combination of dramatic nature, picturesque villages, impressive Romanic churches and old traditions?
Culture, however, is hard to sell during the long, cold and snowy winter of these mountains. Leisure and culture interchange predominance seasonally. The urban dwellers go up there, to the mountains, in winter or summer, to ski, watch 'untamed nature', or to smell cultural history. Significant parts of the public budgets allocated to those areas are supposed to keep access to the resorts, or the infrastructure of the parks, functional. In other words, significant parts of the budgets allocated to those areas maintain those elements used by the seasonal waves of visitors.

Hyper-Modern Place Attachments
This article focuses on the analysis of the restructuration of the territory and its natural resources through public policies and private commercial initiatives. It can be argued, rightfully so, that this type of analysis emphasizes structural patterns. One must be careful, however, not to ignore or mischaracterize local agency associated with the studied process.
Locals are far from passive subjects of history; they resisted, fostered and took advantage of each one of the changes that affected valleys and mountains of the Pyrenees across history. Their actions and activities can be read in terms of strategies. It is from this perspective that one needs to understand the local imbrications of these political and economic processes. After the industrial collapse, while enduring an atrocious demographic crisis, most local elites understood the new position of the Pyrenees in the national and global economic system. Locals, especially local politicians, realized that they had been displaced to the interior periphery and that, in order to recover significance, they had to reinvent themselves (Anderson, 1991). The goal was to identify new products attractive enough to the urban market to pull its attention, once again, to the mountains.
Parks, resorts and museums are the result of a complex and multi-layered process simultaneously fostered by external and local initiatives. The mountain communities are not homogeneous entities. They also have high internal diversity. Inside the villages at least two models of development can be perceived, cohabitating in precarious equilibrium. On the one hand there are those who foster urbanization and territorial speculation based on mass tourism and ski resorts. On the other hand, there are other groups attempting to create sustainable processes of development based on smallscale cultural and ecological tourism. These two trends have split entire communities and, interestingly enough, they have branched out of the communities when these groups, to establish regional alliances, have positioned themselves in different camps of the national political parties' divide.
Both camps have something in common. Their strategies are directed at connecting with wider networks and eventually to tap resources from them. The commoditization of nature for leisure purposes is an obvious instance of this strategy. The patrimonialization of traditions such as food, ceremonies, or markets is a more subtle example. Museization is often considered an appropriation and manipulation of a local identity. In many cases, however, this museization is fostered from local grounds to generate yet another tourist attraction (Prats 1997;Frigolé 2005). Local culinary products, such as cheeses, various types of treated meats, alcohol, fruits and vegetables, have also been recovered, and these items are featured prominently in restaurants, hotels and grocery shops all over the area. Their value as 'natural' or 'traditional' products translates into higher selling prices. These small-scale industries are mainly local, and they take advantage of this contemporary taste for non-industrialized foods. Food becomes an identity marker with significant economic consequences, as well as an element that connects these localities with globalized values (Heller 2006).
The discussion about local agency has also to include another important element. All the economic transformations described above have not resulted in the total eradication of economic activities from previous productive modes. In other words, these mountains are still crossed by dozens, if not hundreds, of transhumant herds. Many hydropower plants and its dams are still in operation. There are still, here and there, a few factories and a few mines functioning.
In most cases the survival of these activities is not due to a 'revival obsession'. Sheepherders, for instance, are still roaming around these mountains because at some level it still makes economic sense. Agrarian censuses seem to point out less numerous but larger herds. Local strategies have been influenced by economic gains and availability of ecological and social possibilities. The patrimonialization is a fact, which does not mean, however, that it has wiped out every other economic activity.
Patrimonialization depends on carefully constructed idealizations of the natural and cultural past. Ironically, farmers and ranchers, with genealogies of century-old occupation, do not necessarily share these imaginaries. They, more often than not, disagree with the reintroduction of species. They do not like ungulates because they interfere with the seasonal grazing circulation. But they especially do not like the reintroduction of predators, such as bears or wolves: species their grandparents helped to remove. Contemporary herders do not necessarily fit either with the image built of them in museums.
The new economic paradigm is designed to provide services to visitors. Obviously, while doing so it generates jobs and revenues for locals, but a fact remains: the collective productive identity depends on the influx of waves of seasonal strangers.
In anthropology, traditionally, attachment to place has been explained by exploring the deep ties between communities and their environments (Feld & Basso 1996;Strang 1997). This approach, with old precedents in the social sciences, has been instrumental in the description of detailed and accurate ways of understanding, classifying and using the environment. Cultural ecologists, ethnobiologists and landscape analysts have contributed greatly to the documentation of this locally contextualized form of knowledge. In the hyper-modern era, place attachment cannot be understood without multi-scalar analysis (Appadurai 1996;Paulson & Gezon 2005). Although people from the Pyrenees do have a deep knowledge of their territory and a profound connection with the environment, it is important not to essentialize local communities. Massive waves of emigration have left many communities in a weakened demographic state, with aging populations and little productive capacity. In addition, generational fractures are also highly evident in these communities. New occupations require new knowledge and skills not necessarily associated with a deep understanding of the environment. In other words, an intense sense of place did not stop the community from disaggregating under economic pressures.
In these mountains connectivity has been an important factor, at least, since the Middle Ages. Caravans charging wool connected their local markets with those of the towns in the Languedoc and central Catalonia (Le Roy Ladurie 1979). Industrialization connected them with the industrialized cities and a new way of life. The industrial collapse connected, in an intangible way, the Catalan mountains with Morocco, South Africa and so on. Globalization, thus, turned these mountains into just another node of a global economic system. Consequently, in the name of efficiency and profitability, the economic grid became rearranged and the Western mountains were dropped into a peripheral state.
The development of a new set of commodities, covering a new set of needs relocated, once again, these mountains in the global network. Leisure, nature and culture resituated this region in a more central position in the collective imaginary and the economic and demographic fluxes of contemporary Spanish society.
The hyper-mobility dominating the current global economic system forces us to see place attachment as a succession of connections at different geographical and Consuming Space, Nature and Culture 271 cultural scales that have an impact on the construction of individual and collective identity.
Identity, as a consequence, is not exclusively the result of local arrangements. The position of these communities in relation to the larger national and international societies is as important as their own internal dynamics. In this hyper-modern era these villages are providing nature, leisure and tradition. Therefore, the expectations of tradition generated by the historically peripheral position of these communities in the global society have an impact on how their inhabitants construct themselves, and how they present themselves.