Conocimientos acerca de plantas en la nueva ruralidad. Cambio social y agro ecología en el Parque Natural de Montesinho (Portugal)

For decades, the Northeastern Portugal, a mountainous territory along the Spanish border, has suffered from critical economic changes and a slow steady decline of the population that have had a degrading effect on the agroecosystems and rural landscape. A study case has been carried out inside a protected area from Trás-os-Montes (2006-2007), the Natural Park of Montesinho supported by the research project “Ethnobotany of the Northeastern Region of Portugal: local knowledge, plants and uses”. How these changes are affecting the system of local knowledge of plant resources and the maintenance of traditional plant use practices are some of the questions that we address. Within a new social context, different rural life-ways have been designed. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) coexists with modern trends in plants knowledge and use, recently introduced in local culture by present-day media and popular books, for instance. People’s knowledge, local perceptions and classifications of the natural environment have been confirmed and compared by gender, age, educational background, occupation and other personal data in order to analyse erosion of TEK and partial or total loss of social and cultural memory. Collected data focus on a conceptual discussion of TEK and provide some clues to the understanding of how important are TEK preservation, and the careful management of the environment and of natural resources for the conservation status of protected areas.