ABSTRACT
Over a period of several years, a group within the Department of Geography at the University of Barcelona, has been carrying out research into the problems of marginality in the Catalan Pyrenees, an area which, for a number of decades, has been considered economically less dynamic than the rest of the region—characterised by lower population densities, poor accessibility and severe problems of communication. Traditionally, the Pyrenees has been seen by centralised administrative bodies as a major supplier of natural resources (largely, timber and water) which have been exploited for the benefit of the rest of the region. In this way, for many years, the Pyrenees has collaborated in the industrial development of Catalonia by supplying a large part of the region’s energy requirements, on the one hand, and contributing to the human capital resource on the other, as the area has been stripped of its most basic resource: its people (Fig. 1).
