María del Carmen Martínez Insua
General Manager of Cultural Heritage of the Xunta de Galicia
General Manager of Cultural Heritage of the Department of Education and University Management of the Xunta de Galicia since 2013.
Graduated in Law, obtained the management diploma and is entitled in the upper course of public law. She began her administrative career at the General Directorate of Human Resources of SERGAS as legal technical adviser, and then to develop positions in the Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Forestry. In 1996 she began to serve in the Department of Education and University Management, first in staff and student promotion and then in the headquarters of programming, hiring and equipment service. She also held technical and administrative support responsabilities at the Advisory Council for Administrative Recruiment of Galicia of the Ministryof Finance, and held, between 2009 and 2013, the post of deputy general director of constructions and equipment of the Department of Education and University Management.
Presentation: The Way of St. James: The commitment of the Public Powers
The institutional recognition of the Way of Saint James can not be confined to the merely declarative. In a complex reality, defined by scientific and technical progress, socioeconomic evolution and territorial transformations, public authorities can not avoid their responsibility for management and protection. Galicia is well aware of the richness of the Way of Saint James, of the significance they have in their history and identity. This degree of consciousness is only credible if, in the elaboration of norms and in public management, the cultural values that the roads contain are defended in order to keep them alive and to be able to transmit them to future generations.
In this way, in the Autonomous Community of Galicia, a system of protection was devised that allowed the exercise of public powers, based on exclusive and full competence in matters of Cultural Heritage. The Way, is territory, is landscape, spatial configuration around a route of pilgrimage that vertebrate the European West and conceived Galicia as a goal. This territory confers a significant burden on monuments, ethnographic elements, traditional nuclei, agrarian and forest lands, urban developments, old and new. In this way, the task was not easy. It was approached through the understanding of the roads as historical territories, where the administration performs a preventive control that guarantees that future evolutions do not attack the flow of material and immaterial treasured history.
The territorial characteristics of Galicia, original and complex, pose a challenge for public authorities. The Xunta de Galicia does not shirk its commitments, it understands that these are a precious heritage of the Galicians of the past, who cared for a tradition that today is revealed as a unique resource for endogenous development, social progress and economic growth. We are therefore faced with exceptional opportunities, but also with obvious risks that demand the high and conscious responsibility of the public powers: State, Autonomous Communities, City Councils and, especially, the whole society.
November
