ABSTRACT
This descriptive and understanding field has vernacular activity as a substantial concept in its work. In the context of geographical discipline, vernacular qualities refer to certain well determined spatial areas and can be understood, precisely, as the set of variables that define a profile, whether regional or local, depending on the chosen scale. In the different geographical research traditions, the problem of the region and, of course, the smaller divisions, especially that of small counties, has been extensively discussed. For the positivists, strong defenders of environmental determinism in geography, the concept of region was to have a primarily physiographic sense (for example a watershed or a kind of climate). Historicism, more positive, preferred the concept of “geographic regions” to that of “natural regions”, which included the human action on the landscape. Precisely here, in this perspective, is where the recent development of the “cultural landscape” concept should be included. In it, the region appears as “an individualized geographic space due to its homogeneity, constituted by an association of sites or adjacent places, and characterized by a geographical root around which, it has been constituted” as Gómez Piñero reminded (1995: 481). Sites, landscapes and places, understood as lower units, structure the regions as geographical
1 INTRODUCTION
No discipline can claim the “space” as a unique field of scientific activity, not only because all human existence unfolds in space, but also because the experience of space, as Tim Unwin (1995) has rightly reminded occurs through the experience of time. One could say that space, by itself lacks meaning, and although all physical processes have a spatial context, the “place” would prove to be the product of the specific meeting of two coordinates: time and space as a synthesis of the historical dimension that are remembered, and the geographic dimension that are perceived. “Place has become the essential point to understand the interaction of the human world experience with the physical world of existence” (Unwin, 1995: 291) and, therefore, the construction of a comprehensive, holistic framework for research action in this field should start first without any doubts, from the geography sphere.
