Enveigt is situated in France at the heart of the Eastern Pyrenees. This territory offers vast uplands where strong environmental and heritage traditions come together and are perpetuated by ancient pastoral and agricultural practices, as well as other social uses such as hunting and green tourism. Pastoralism survives today against the backdrop of a difficult global context of rural depopulation, fallow land, rewilding and climate change.

The story of this area is deeply connected to pastoralism and agriculture, which have developed since the Neolithic and flourished through time under the influence of oro-Mediterranean climate.

Unfortunately, current practices of extensive countryside management have led to increasing abandonment of land, resulting in the inevitable and uncontrollable overgrowth of woody vegetation and the loss of high-quality grassland and its related biodiversity. But there is a way of keeping these highlands in good shape, passed on through the generations just as it has been in other European mountain communities, shaping valuable pastoral landscapes through time.

It’s the technique of controlled burning, which creates life through fire.

To an inexperienced observer, burning in order to preserve might sound contradictory. But controlled burning is in fact a tradition of maintenance and regeneration, notably of high-altitude pastures.

Carried out generally during the winter, controlled burning targets those plant species that the livestock don’t consume during the summer and which end up progressively invading the pastures, taking up pastoral resources necessary for the herds and making the landscape less species rich.

Nowadays, prescribed burning is regaining its role in landscape management and plays a crucial role in biocultural heritage conservation. Its traditional use is constantly being adapted to meet the new and ever-changing social demands on the management of these environments, and it is now mainly implemented by fire professionals at the request of livestock farmers.

In the current context of climate change and the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires, this practice is always framed and organised by fire professionals, while it includes training for the local people who are involved in maintaining these traditions safely and adapting them for the future.

In Enveitg, the controlled burnings of the last 30 years have mainly taken place at mid altitude (1600-2200 MSL), where rewilding was particularly significant between the 1970s and 1990s. At the same time, the recovery of this practice has also allowed the discovery of unknown and unsuspected archaeological sites obscured by vegetation such as broom.