Comprehensive territorial strategies to enhance the agricultural-cultural landscape. Ribeira Sacra, Galicia, Spain

The Ribeira Sacra is a cultural landscape of immense potential. To its vast territory we must add the peculiarity of its terraces, resulting from hard and continued work over centuries of viticulturists that have left their footprint on the steep topography. These factors have made it a remarkable Spanish tourist destination. However, ongoing gradual population loss, insufficient generation replacement resulting from scant economic opportunities and options, poorly coordinated and locally focused actions of territory-based stakeholders’ initiatives, and the lack of a regulatory framework to provide a comprehensive organization to preserve the territotry result in an increasingly weaker territorial identity as a cultural landscape. Under the premise that the territory provides by itself the answers to its own demands, a methodology of analysis and diagnosis of the Ribeira Sacra is proposed that helps to determine possible guidelines, which, in addition, help to preserve and revalue the patrimony, natural resources and tourist attractions this place offers, and can support or become a starting point for a potential scheme for integral planning that protects and values the agricultural cultural landscape.