The director of the Urban Planning Department of the Picanya City Council (Valencia) and the urban architect Víctor García Gil, have presented the Picanya Catalogue of Protections, in an explanatory session open to the public.
The municipality of Picanya, located southwest of the city of Valencia, is located on a plain with an average altitude of 15 meters above sea level. The municipality belongs to the L’Horta Sud region and is crossed by the Barranc de Xiva (or Barranc de Torrent) that crosses the municipality in a west-east direction, dividing the urban area into two parts: to the north the most industrial area, made up of the Alquería del Moret and Alquería de Raga industrial estates and the Vistabella neighborhood; to the south the residential area made up of the traditional urban area and the extension zone.
The work entrusted to the AUG-ARQUITECTOS SLP team consists of drafting a complete Catalogue of Protections, that is, one that consists of natural, landscape, cultural and Democratic Memory sections. This approach has allowed us to apply a comprehensive vision to the study and subsequent cataloging of the elements of interest from a holistic perspective. Reading the set of legal provisions that currently affect Heritage and which, of course, are not only those directly associated with it, allows us to understand that the concept of “heritage to be protected” and the relationship of the different elements that comprise it, is today much richer and more complex than it was a few years ago. Indeed, no one disputes that everything should be protected equally, from the intangible sensations associated with the concept of landscape, to the small elements that in building or urban planning mark the difference between one era and another, in different towns. The protection of an element cannot be understood without considering its environment, the landscape that justified it and that determines the relationship of that element with a broader environment. But we cannot ignore the details of its carpentry, the type of material used on the floor, on the jambs at the entrance to a house or on the plastering of a wall, as they are also an inseparable part of the asset that we intend to discover and protect.
With this vision, a document has been drawn up that will guarantee the protection of the heritage of a municipality that is exemplary in its interpretation of the territory and in the implementation of urban green infrastructure, the result of work developed over the last decades.