Rural plots in Galicia are not usually registered in the Land Registry (with the exception of land consolidation areas), as this is not compulsory. Moreover, while most plots have a cadastral owner, the owner is often unlocatable. There is no accurate data, but the magnitude of the problem in Galicia can be estimated from the work on the management of the biomass in the buffer strips around rural settlements. By law, landowners should keep these strips clean of biomass to avoid forest fires getting close to the housing, however around 40% of cadastral owners cannot be located. To address this problem, the Galician Law on Farmland Recovery granted the regional government the power to investigate the ownership of plots and, if the owner cannot be found, to make them available for use by renting them through the Land Bank. This procedure has already been applied in instruments such as agroforestry parks or model villages in order to mobilise these lands around the settlements and with unknown owners.
At the
16th International LANDNET workshop by FAO, Inés Santé presented the possibilities offered by the procedures and instruments introduced by this law, which address one of the main problems for rural land management: the lack of knowledge regarding ownership.
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