Fontelo, the forgotten mountain of Ferrol

The custody of the territory and the generative transition of the Fontelo mountain.

It seemed that there was that question in the minds of people who started a project from an illusion and turned it into a reality. The procedural difficulty of the administrative processes of the marina, the current owner of the mountain, was postulated as a first problem that did not compare to the real background of the matter. A background of neighborhood connection with the mountain, with its land, of local sovereignty and public use. The only thing that was indispensable was to guarantee a planning and a transition that, rather than preserving, managed to discover and bring out the sensibility of the people with the mountains that surround us. The need to be inspired but not anchored in the past, articulates the landscape planning of the Fontelo through community management, thanks, for example, to a territory custody agreement. The custody of the territory is a current based on the conservation of the environment and the landscape through the collaboration between the entities of custody (Civil Associations) and the owners or users of the land. It started at the end of the 19th century in the USA, and quickly spread through Canada, Latin America and Europe. The first custody agreement in Spain was in 1975, at the Montejo da Vega Refuge for Birds of Prey in Segovia, promoted by the famous and influential environmentalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. In this context, Monte Fontelo is seen as an ideal place to achieve a sustainable transition in landscape management, which could combine nature conservation with the activation of local economic communities.