The Current and Past Landscapes of a Volcanic Mountain Area: the Chinyero Special Nature Reserve (Tenerife, Canary Islands)
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Abstract
The Chinyero Special Nature Reserve is located northwest of Tenerife at an altitude between 600 and 1,550 meters. Today, this protected area offers an exceptional natural landscape that stands out its recent and historic volcanoes of strombolian morphology, dotted with Canary pine forests. However, in some parts of the reserve, traces of other landscapes from the past have been discovered which correspond to an original population living near the volcanoes and the forests of this area. This paper aims to study the landscape of this natural reserve in order to identify and characterize the features of its current physiognomy, and to also recover other forgotten landscapes of these mountains. Today the protection and management priorities are based only on their natural values. The recovery of these ancient physiognomies will reveal the important cultural content that these landscapes also possess, because they were the best reflection of what was a rational use of scarce natural resources and. This paper focuses on the study of the landscape through an analysis of the spatial relationship of its components and their relative importance in the configuration of an exclusive image of the Canary mountains, with particular emphasis on its evolution.