Montseny

The Montseny is the highest massif in the Catalan Pre-Coastal Range and the oldest natural park in Catalonia. The protected area covers 30,120 hectares across eighteen municipalities in the provinces of Barcelona and Girona, in the comarques of Osona, La Selva and Vallès Oriental, and culminates in the Turó de l'Home, at 1,706 m. It is managed by the provincial councils of Barcelona and Girona.

Its ecological value is explained by the gradient: within a relatively small territory very close to the great metropolitan conurbations live plant communities characteristic of the three great European biomes. On the lower ground, the Mediterranean world of holm oak, cork oak and Aleppo pine; at middle altitudes, the Eurosiberian one of beech forest, Scots pine and silver fir; and on the summits, grassland of boreo-alpine affinity. That mosaic, together with the differences in humidity and temperature between slopes, generates a diversity of habitats exceptional for the region.

Protection began with the Montseny Special Plan, approved on 26 July 1977 by the Provincial Planning Commission of Barcelona over 31,064 hectares and ratified by ministerial order in January 1978. A few months later, on 28 April 1978, UNESCO declared the massif a Biosphere Reserve, with a far wider scope than the park's: the same eighteen municipalities but in their full extent. Formal declaration as a Natural Park by the Generalitat came in 1987, and in June 2014, after a participatory process with all the municipalities, the reserve was extended to 50,166 hectares and some 52,000 inhabitants. Today the official name of the whole is Montseny Natural Park and Biosphere Reserve. Its cultural imprint — masies, springs, historic paths — has inspired artists, intellectuals and scientists since the nineteenth century.