Poblet and Mount Athos: spiritual twins

Spirituality is definitely back on the agenda of the 21st century. Even the old (and especially the oldest) monasteries are creeping into the newspaper headlines. Which brings me to the Delos Initiative whose agenda is to help secure the sanctity and biodiversity of sacred natural sites in developed countries across the world. Sprung from the World Commission on Protected Areas of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) - one of the world´s biggest environmental organizations and lobbies - the Delos Initiative has so far selected 27 sacred natural sites: 1 in Australia, 1 in Bulgaria, 2 in Finland, 3 in Greece (inclsuing the Athos Peninsula), 1 in Israel, 2 in Italy, 2 in Japan, 1 in Morocco, 2 in Romania, 1 in Russia, 1 in South Africa, 1 in South Korea, 2 in the US, 2 in the UK (Arran Island Marine Reserve and Lindisfarne National Nature Reserve) and five (!) in Spain. Coincidence? Spain has plenty sites that would qualify. Among those selected so far four (! - again) are based in Catalonia: Poblet Monastery, Montsant, Montserrat and the (Buddhist) Tashi Ling Monastery in the Park of Garraf.

The idea behind the Delos Initiative is to investigate and learn from the relationship between, e.g., Poblet Monastery and its surrounding landscape - a protected nature reserve with different types of Mediterranean forests and vineyards in the lowlands. It is all about re-valuing the spirituality of nature reserves and about recognizing the traditions, know-how and skills of the ancestral custodians of nature such as the monastic communities. In the words of Josep Maria Mallarach, geologist and environmental consultant, "the protection of natural sites is a very recent phenomenon, whereas the concept of sacralization of nature stems from remote times...when national parks managers only take into consideration material values and devalue non-material ones, the spiritual foundation that has kept these landscapes intact is being undervalued". Wise words. A series of concrete proposals and projects exploiting the synergies between Poblet and its woodland-cum-vineyard landscape are in the pipeline - I´ll keep you posted!

For more on this initiative see: www.med-ina.org/delos/sites.htm