Percepciones del paisaje, una mirada de la belleza escénica en el paisaje cultural cafetero de Risaralda (Colombia)

Abstract

Despite not being considered as a patrimonial attribute of the Coffee Cultural Landscape, the scenic
beauty of this territory is a fundamental part of the sense of place that identifies its inhabitants.
However, this landscape does not have systematic studies aimed at informing about its visual
attributes and how these are perceived by the subjects. Therefore, the work reports the results of a
survey that sought to relate the scenic beauty perceived by the participants with attributes regarded
in the literature as predictors of preference, evaluating the levels of maintenance, complexity and
naturalness of 20 viewsheds corresponding to declared areas as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in
eleven municipalities of the department of Risaralda, Colombia. The study found that the visual
attribute with the greatest explanatory power is maintenance, represented in the landscape by signs
of care, defined geometries, soft textures and differentiable shapes. This preference is explained
from the similarity of the viewsheds with the idealized image of the coffee landscape, highlighting
the need for subsequent research efforts that account for the visual attributes associated with the
natural values of the landscape, as a means of defining heritage management guidelines of the
landscape that can transcend the established aesthetic canon