The safeguarded landscape in Costa Rica: norms, heritage, and environment

Abstract

The landscape is relatively a new concept, besides its increasingly presence in the international scenario, particularly as a notion or a preservation category. Was proposed an analysis regarding the relation between the concept of environment, landscape, participation, and heritage, considered as structural for the cultural landscape idea, to identify the theoretical-conceptual approaches in the Costa Rican legislation. Such analysis was made since different multidisciplinary views, which allows to put under the critic screen the landscape idea historically related to the euro-centered notion of beauty, in accordance with Cauquelin, as a “poetic world´s representation”, anchored at the inherent presence of nature. A bibliography revision was conducted considering the compendium of norms related to environment, urban planning and historical - architectural heritage. Was identified, first, a significant weight given to the landscape defined from the Landscape Ecology perspective, and secondly, to the scenic beauty idea, in both cases, it is addressed as a resource. The landscape heritage reaffirms itself as an approach which will, conceptually and even from practical way, tension the way that the management of the landscape preservation in Costa Rica have been carried out.