This article outlines a field approach conducted in Bages comarca from March to July 2024 as part of a research project titled "Interfaces between vineyards and forests: strategic locations for planning a resilient territory." This approach highlighted the strategic role of viticultural actors in this fire-prone territory, particularly in relation to their position relative to the forests.

The aim of our research in Bages is to examine how fire risk prevention can be approached based on existing agricultural practices in this territory, whose heritage is closely linked to viticulture. The goal is to determine whether these practices, their interfaces, and their locations can provide opportunities for fire risk prevention in this area.

Coline Pacton, Paysagiste conceptrice

PhD at the Università degli Studi di Genova, CLOE project (MSCA Cofund)

From viticultural heritage to forest landscapes

The viticultural heritage of Bages territory served as the starting point for studying the current role of this practice. The approach we adopted is based on a field study aimed at better understanding the landscapes by traversing them and meeting the people who shape them today. Despite a significant decline, traces of the importance of viticulture can still be found throughout the comarca: along roads, near villages, but especially under trees where we still find bancales or tines, remnants of this past. Although viticultural landscapes have given way to forested ones, certain recent events, such as the fire in Pont de Vilomara in 2022, have revived these once-cultivated landscapes, raising questions about their persistence despite abandonment. Today, viticulture is found in the comarca in a scattered form, like islands within this vast forest area, which is particularly vulnerable to fire risk. The challenge is to understand the potential role of these specific situations in mitigating and managing this risk.

Scattered and isolated winegrowing practices: a possible network in the territory?

Our study took place in the south of Bages, in order to meet some of the active winegrowers. Today, these stakeholders can be distinguished by their geographical position in the comarca, but also by their production methods: producers affiliated to the Artés cooperative, winemaker-oenologist within large estates, owners of family estates, new players in the process of setting up. Despite this diversity of contexts, our findings reveal several common themes and echoing difficulties: an interest in soil quality and water management, but also a constant need to adapt to increasingly unpredictable climatic events, as well as concerns about inheritance. Our analysis of these themes has led us to identify two major dynamics underway in the region, which are interdependent.

First of all, a vicious spiral has set in, linking a number of issues. For example, difficulties in transferring vineyards are linked to production and profit issues, themselves linked to a combination of unfavorable climatic conditions and administration that struggles to cope with the pace of change. This dynamic often leads to abandonment. The other dynamic observed, and which stems from this abandonment, is the concentration of practices in certain areas of Bages, particularly in the large estates, reducing the presence of viticulture throughout the territory. Yet the presence of vines at forest interfaces, and their dispersal throughout the area, are vital issues, as GRAF reminded us at the workshop held in December 2024 at the Artium cooperative in Artés.

Many of these wine-growing islands are located close to or within forests, and represent “pilot situations” for studying their interfaces with woodlands. In this sense, their specific geographical positions, confronted with different species, topography and soils, become a fertile source of information on ways of managing these mixed interfaces in other parts of the comarca, and even beyond.

This approach allows us to foresee opportunities for networking actors and practices within the territory, leading both to the activation of these interfaces in the context of fire risk prevention, and to consider their place in a territorial approach to Bages.