Gómez Mendoza and Mata treat landscape as territory in transformation and use that position to challenge simplified narratives of sustainability and ‘return to nature’. Their iconic move is to read apparently naturalising forest processes against the simultaneous territorial pressures of urbanisation, tourism and intensive agricultural production. The paper turns geographical landscape analysis into a method for detecting contradictions between visible change, management discourse and the deeper spatial organisation of land. Field observation, historical interpretation and attention to morphology are joined to a scalar argument: boundaries, flows, settlement patterns, property structures, resilience and irreversibility become legible differently according to the scale at which they are observed. The work also reiterates geography’s capacity to interpret, decipher, describe and narrate natural, agrarian, industrial, urban and periurban landscapes within a single territorial frame. Its bridge to sustainability studies is critical rather than celebratory: sustainability must be evaluated through the actual trajectories and spatial consequences of management, not through the vocabulary that accompanies it.
