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In a certainly paradoxical way, consciousness of
the landscape dimension of all the cultural routes was really taken
into account only very recently.
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However, since the election of the pilgrimways to
Santiago de Compostella, the question of the tranversality of
landscape constitutes a central dimension of the cultural routes -
which does not always surface - but which however remains essential
for the "physical" experience of the routes.
 making the european landscape convention concrete
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It is clear that the cultural and patrimonial
approach that accompanied or guided research on the scientific
contents of the topics was generally a historical approach meant to
mark the traces and to emphasise in what way they were meaningful
for a contrastive and rich explanation of the history of
Europe.
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Similarly, the old human component (archaeological
traces, written, sung, told...), or the recent component
(artefacts, work places, living places, live shows, accounts of
journeys...) made it possible to give meaning and substance to new
development needs. In other words, if temporal and human dimensions
were taken into account, the dimension of physical geography, as
well as that of nature, were generally ignored. That is due mainly
to the fact that the majority of institutions and administrations
involved in this program are accustomed to retaining only the
cultural aspect of the cultural route and to thinking only about
historical and human routes. To put it differently: this is due to
the fact that cultural services only very seldom work with
environmental or regional planning services.
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However, many of the proposals that reached the
Institute or were elected by the Council of Europe clearly present
a landscape dimension, related to the rural or urban landscape. The
territory is indeed approached there from various angles, quoted
here on purpose in the greatest disorder: protection and
valorisation of the vernacular rural settlement in its broad
environmental context, the role of monasteries and pilgrimage ways
in the historical development of territories, fundamental thinking
about the birth of the very notion of "landscape" in European
painting, research on landscape identity markers related to certain
human activities (the cultivation of the mulberry tree for the
silkworm, the cultivation of the olive-tree or the vine, the
creation of agricultural or industrial companies in rural
territory, urban industrial development...).
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For the landscape constitutes a cultural heritage
"speaking" in the same European terms as architectural heritage. To
go even further, the analysis of memory in rural and urban
landscapes certainly constitutes a two-fold field of work that can
help in avoiding serious errors regarding development and town
planning or that can make it possible to repair some of them.
The cultural routes thus touch - without having
really meant it throughout the years - on multiple dimensions of
the cultural landscape: memory, history, journey, living places,
archetypes. It is thus necessary to cover the whole anthropological
dimension. As Simon Schama indicates:
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"Then, if we correctly admit that man's influence
on earth's ecology was not without inconvenience, let us also admit
that the long trade between nature and culture is not a series of
predetermined one-way calamities. At least let us do justice to the
human eye, because it is its glance that makes all the difference
between the raw material and the landscape".
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