Summary
This contribution examines the social and historical impact of the Francoist forestry plans in Spain focusing on its archaeological consequences. The industrial forestry combines the political and bureaucratic administration with technology and engineering services in order to transform rural land through legal statements of expropriation, but also through the agency of trees. The Dictatorship used this mechanism to appropriate and transform many private and communal properties all around the country in an exercise of internal coloniality of power. In fact, the industrial forestry was part of large-scale operations developed by the Francoist regime in his quest for the material construction of his ideal Spain with more or less unexpected consequences. On the one hand, the forestation implies the final migration event of many rural inhabitants and the formal extinction of their municipalities. On the other, the progressive rising of the pines converted many villages into a forest, destroying its historical landscape and concealing its remains. The industrial forestry was here an agent of ruination and abandonment. The sequence of this process is straightly related with the historical Spanish rural depopulation, as the State intervention intensified the already structural weakness of the countryside. Today, the forestation process reveals its strategic functionality for the Dictatorship in the long term, since the forestry policy is one technique of “naturalization” of old peasant’s places and so of the political actions that changes those lands. Different social agents from the far-right movement to more popular ecologist’s common-sense defend this forestry heritage as valuable and positive, while some others points out its dramatic effects. Here I will highlight how the Francoist forestry policy still determines the access of rural land and prevents form the knowledge of the historical and popular roots of the countryside. Archaeology could reveal what is hidden in the woods.