Dive into Dry Stone Week this 2024!
Discover Dry Stone Week!
Dry Stone Week is an event to promote and recognise this technique as a heritage and craft. Activities will be held throughout Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Andorra from 22 November to 1 December.
The activities are divided into outreach, learning and discovery activities. Among the activities on offer we find talks, conferences, exhibitions, guided tours, tours with tastings, photography competitions or workshops to learn the technique and volunteer days to rebuild some dry stone constructions. Through the activities and their dissemination, we also seek to show the extensive network of entities, groups and volunteers who work for their maintenance and dissemination throughout the territory.
Dry Stone Week was created in 2020, promoted by ADRINOC, the Association for Comprehensive Rural Development, through the COL·LABORAxPAISATGE cooperation project.
Since 2022, the Association of Microtowns of Catalonia and the Torrebesses City Council have been responsible for its organisation with the aim of maintaining and growing the project that has been started. Dry Stone Week has the support and funding of the Lleida Provincial Council through the Institute of Lleida Studies, as well as the collaboration of different public and private entities throughout the territory that contribute to its dissemination.
Dry stone in Catalonia
The shores of the Mediterranean are one of the areas with the greatest presence of dry stone elements. In the rural area of Catalonia there is a very important heritage of dry stone constructions that articulate the landscape through cabins, huts, cisterns, farmhouses, ovens, waterwheels, fountains, banks, ponds or tubs.
This set of knowledge and techniques is based on the construction of any construction using stones from the environment without any cohesive material, such as lime or plaster. Most of these constructions have a direct relationship with agricultural or livestock work, forest exploitation or water supply.
In Catalonia, many of them are protected as Cultural Assets of Local Interest (BCIL), Cultural Assets of National Interest (BCIN), Zones of Ethnological Interest (ZIE), or located in natural parks or other categories of protected areas.
Despite its ecological, aesthetic, historical and identity-based values, this heritage is immersed in a dynamic of abandonment that leads to its deterioration and destruction. This coincides, unfortunately, with the disappearance of the "marger" (dry stone builder) trade and the loss of knowledge of this construction technique. Entities and volunteers have been striving for years to maintain, restore and disseminate this heritage and this technique, which, moreover, has proven valid in responding to the challenges of contemporary architecture.
On November 28, 2018, the dry stone technique received recognition as Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, an essential milestone in addressing its protection and recovery.
Dry Stone Week seeks to contribute to protecting this heritage, making it known and giving it prestige.
Definitely a top-notch cultural event!
