Unescocat presents the website www.unescocat.org/Montseny as a contribution to heritage preservation and to sustainable economic development of the area.

The website www.unescocat.org/Montseny is the result of research conducted by a team of the UNESCO Centre of Catalonia, between 2009 and 2011, within the framework of the project entitle Methodology for the inventory of the intangible cultural heritage of biosphere reserves: the experience of Montseny.

The project has received support from the Biodiversity Foundation and was developed in collaboration with the Biosphere Reserve of Montseny, the Montseny Ethnological Museum in Arbúcies and the Centre for the Promotion of Catalan Popular and Traditional Culture. It consisted in drawing up an inventory of the traditions, customs, knowledge, techniques, festivals, etc... that constitute the intangible cultural heritage of Montseny, and also in identifying, among these elements, those that can contribute to the sustainable development of the region. The project outputs are aimed to become, among other things, a tool for the definition and implementation of local policies in these fields.

The ultimate goals of this project are to contribute to safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage of Montseny, promote sustainable economic development in the area, strengthening social cohesion and rootedness to the land and cast light on the Montseny Biosphere Reserve as a reference for international inventories of intangible cultural heritage. Indeed, the experience carried out in the Montseny helped develop a methodology that could serve as a model for similar inventories in other territories around the world, as the UNESCO Convention requires its from signatories.

The website includes the results obtained during the different project phases: inventory, methodology and a study on the contribution of intangible cultural heritage to sustainable development. The website has been made in four languages, and will be updated with the input we receive.

The project was presented to the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage, of UNESCO, to be included in the register of best practices of  implementation of the Convention. This Committee is currently holding its 6th session (22-29/11/2011) in Bali (Indonesia) to examine the first reports of the Member States on the implementation of the Convention and the current status of the items entered in the Lists. It also will monitor the elements inscribed on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding and evaluate the inclusion of new items to Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as the human towers, or Castells, were in 2010.