L’Horta has reduced its extension and has stopped acting as a functional agricultural space.
Its historic-cultural heritage suffers (and still continues to) an accelerated degradation, while the urbanistic and infrastructure pressure (road, railway, hydraulic) doesn’t stop.
Nowadays, Valencian society is more aware of the irreversible loss that may entail urbanising l’Horta even more. That’s why the Llei 4/2004 d'Ordenació del Territori i Protecció del Paisatge i Pla d'Acció Territorial de l’Horta de València (Law 4/2004 on Territorial Planning and Protection of the Landscape and Territorial Action Plan of Horta de València) provided tools and resources to manage it.
However, this plan was never implemented and it wasn’t until 2018 when a new law written by the Government of the Valencian Community was approved (Decret 219/2018, 30th of November, accepting the Pla d’acció territorial d’ordenació i dinamització de l’Horta de València.
This territorial action plan regulates every aspect related to the ordering of the territory, the urbanism and the landscape of l’Horta de València. Principally, it highlights the definition
- of its green structure,
- the regulation of its settlement system,
- the definition of the uses and activities that may be introduced
- in the landscape integration of the basic or mobility infrastructures that might be located in its area.
This territorial action plan also expects as inspiring principles the European Landscape Convention, to which the Government became adhered on the 17th of September, 2004, and the objectives and principles of the European Territorial Strategy and the documents that develop it.
This plan defines l’Horta de València as one of the most relevant and unique agricultural landscapes of the Mediterranean world due to its productive, environmental, cultural, historical, symbolic and landscape values for the citizens of València. This makes it worthy of a system of protection and revitalization that guarantees survival for future generations.
In addition, this emblematic space generates a local agricultural production that allows the population of the metropolitan area of Valencia to have high quality fruit and vegetable products with reduced transport costs and, therefore, with less greenhouse gas emissions.
However, this valuable landscape seriously threatens to disappear under the pressure of urban development activity, mobility infrastructures and the crisis in agricultural production prices and its consequent abandonment.
For this reason, this territorial action plan aims to preserve l'Horta as an integrated productive, environmental and cultural system, whose foundation are the farmers.
It does not try to protect l'Horta from a museum and petrified vision of this space, but through the configuration of a living, productive, profitable and sustainable space from the triple economic, environmental and social dimension.
