Culture and Heritage Vision

Cultural heritage is defined as the set of assets, material or immaterial, of significant value for knowledge, message, cultural dialogue, or beliefs; ultimately, for the values they convey regarding the collective identity of a people, transmitted from one generation to another.

The cultural heritage of Formentera is made up of all the cultural assets and values that express the island’s identity, such as tradition, customs, and habits, as well as the set of immaterial and material assets, movable and immovable, that hold special historical, artistic, aesthetic, plastic, architectural, urban, archaeological, environmental, ecological, linguistic, sound, musical, audiovisual, filmic, scientific, testimonial, documentary, literary, bibliographic, museological, anthropological interest, and the manifestations, products, and representations of popular culture.

In fact, cultural heritage exists because society values it. There is an entire social construct around it. If an entire community appreciates an object or dances as cultural heritage, it is because human beings are cultural. And, in this way, a collective identity is built that is transmitted from generation to generation, as previously mentioned. Societies create material and immaterial cultural goods. They transmit them to each generation as a way of overcoming adversity.

Awareness of all this arises from the emergence of what is known as the sociology of memory. Human beings also possess collective memory, and it is from this that cultural heritage emerges.

Thus, cultural heritage can be classified as tangible heritage, which consists mainly of built landscapes, architecture and urban planning, archaeological and geological sites, documents, manuscripts or art objects, furniture, industrial or manufactured goods, etc. And, intangible heritage, which can take various forms such as singing, customs, dances, gastronomic traditions, games, myths, stories and legends, testimonies, traditional crafts, acquisition of techniques and savoir-faire, etc.

Today, preserving and conserving the cultural heritage of any place is a fact, a necessity, and a reality. However, this has not always been the case, given that its value is subjective and often determined as cultural heritage based on its symbolic capital, so its total preservation is not always possible. The value that a specific society may attribute to it determines whether there may be looting, pillaging, destruction, etc. It was with the French Revolution that, for the first time, a notion of the necessity of preserving cultural heritage was constructed.