Last academic year 2023-2024, the first natural stone training cycle in the entire Valencian territory began, at the IES Enric Valor de Pego. A unique cycle in the entire Valencian territory and the third in the entire national territory, currently there is only one in Mollerussa and the other in Macael.
This week the deadline for pre-registration for the 2024 – 2025 course has opened at the same Pego institute, which will end on May 24.
The project finds its origin in 2019, when the Regional Association of Marina Alta -MACMA- organized, together with the GALR Montaña de Alicante, in Xaló, a Technical Conference around Dry Stone and its future opportunities. One of the conclusions of those days was the need to assert and raise awareness about the importance of dry stone and its technique, declared Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2018 by UNESCO, and another was the urgent need for training of the hands of work in the trade, a very high demand by marginal professionals who could not find qualified labor to carry out all the jobs entrusted to them.
Thus, the MACMA and the GALR, together with all the City Councils that make it up and 28 associations from across the region, signed the 'Charter of the Cultural Landscape and Dry Stone of the Marina Alta' within the framework of the V Fair Forum
Regional Marina Alta in November 2019 in Ondara, dedicated to the trade and its recovery.
MACMA thus began non-formal training through 40-hour training workshops that have been held in the region with a high degree of participation and success since 2020. But we had to go one step further and seek the
way to include regulated training in this transversal line of the Commonwealth, which is why, in May 2022, the compilation and writing of technical reports began to present a firm proposal to the Department of Education to study the viability of the implementation of the Natural Stone Cycle, the only qualification at the moment approved by the Ministry and in which both semi-mechanized techniques of the
natural stone work as artisanal techniques, as well as dry stone construction.
The reports presented have been written by the technical teams, both from MACMA and CREAMA, which joined the initiative at the request of the Commonwealth, so that the project would have all the synergies of the two regional entities.
The technical documents were presented to the Ministry. The reports determined the need to perpetuate the technique and high employability of the sector, as demonstrated by previous experience and the CREAMA status report.
The Commonwealth and its presidencies have always shown their satisfaction with the task carried out since 2019, hoping that this will be the definitive step for the professionalization of the trade, the recovery and enhancement of our dry stone landscape.
With regard to the professional opportunities that the students of the cycle may have, highlights Nuria Gómez Bolufer, heritage technician and coordinator of the Dry Stone Workshops taught by MACMA "they will be able to work and specialize, not only in extraction of the mechanized and traditional natural stone, of which the cycle is part of the professional family, but the most important and the one that has the most outlet in the world of our
trade, in the work and cutting of mechanized and/or traditional stone, in modern construction in natural stone, traditional dry stone construction, or the most notable and specialized, the rehabilitation of elements
dry stone heritage sites, which despite the fact that many people are unaware of the sector, is a fundamental occupation niche.
