Translated from Catalan by Mary Black

The word landscape is fashionable. It has become thoroughly modern and triggers heated debates on concepts like territory and map. But the most decisive impetus to “canonise ” the predominant word and concept of landscape has come from laws, which refer back to the idea of territory and protection. This makes clear the need for cartography. Maps are not an image like any other: they strive to bring order to the world; they serve to classify and qualify. Yet maps cannot reproduce the totality of the landscape or its evolution: when it abstracts, a map falsifies, departs from reality, simplifies and caricatures it. Key words: Landscape, cartography, geography, map, laws on the landscape “... cogor et e tabulis pictis ediscere mundos qualis et haec docti sit positura dei”. PROPERTIUS, Elegiae, IV, 3, 37-38. “Learning the painted worlds of the map and what position they have been accorded by a learned god”: the elegiac client of Maecenas felt driven to do this two millennia ago. Map and landscape: for many centuries the spatial representation has striven to captur