On the declaration of 'Bien de Interés Cultural' as a mechanism, with regard to Extremadura
There is a silent method to win an argument: ensuring it can no longer be debated. This is achieved not through prohibition or censorship, but through a more elegant gesture: elevating the object in dispute to a category that places it beyond debate. Within the realm of culture, this gesture possesses an administrative name and a regulated procedure. It is termed the declaration of 'Bien de Interés Cultural' (Asset of Cultural Interest).
I write this in light of recent news. The Government of Extremadura has announced it will promote the declaration of bullfighting as a 'Bien de Interés Cultural', alongside an increase in subsidies for the sector. However, the news interests me less for its own sake than for what it reveals: how the BIC status functions when applied not to an altarpiece or an archaeological site, but to a living and contested practice. My thesis is that, in such cases, the BIC does not merely protect. It performs an additional function: it validates, prioritises, and shifts the debate. It operates as a mechanism, not solely as a conservation technique.
1. Definition and function
The 'Bien de Interés Cultural' (Asset of Cultural Interest) is the highest form of heritage protection within the Spanish legal system. It is established by Law 16/1985 on Spanish Historical Heritage and developed by the autonomous communities; in Extremadura, by Law 2/1999 on Historical and Cultural Heritage. For decades, it was applied primarily to what might be termed 'thing-assets': monuments, historical ensembles, movable objects, and archaeological zones.
The decisive shift arrived with the expansion of the heritage concept towards the intangible. Law 10/2015 for the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage expressly recognises the transition from 'thing-assets' to 'activity-assets': it no longer protects only an object, but also ways of doing, rituals, techniques, knowledge, and social practices. Extremaduran legislation admits this same scope. And therein lies the significant difference. Declaring a cathedral a BIC preserves stone. Declaring a living practice a BIC intervenes in a present conflict, because living practices possess agents, economic interests, communities that sustain them, and communities that reject them.
2. Heritage is not found: it is produced
Critical heritage theory has maintained for decades a position that common sense tends to resist: heritage value is not a quality that objects or practices possess in themselves, awaiting discovery. It is a quality attributed to them. Laurajane Smith formulated this with precision: there is no such thing as 'heritage' in an essential sense, but rather an authorised discourse that determines what qualifies as heritage and what does not, privileging specific expert and institutional modes of definition. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett stated it even more categorically: heritage is a mode of cultural production in the present that draws upon the past. It does not verify antiquity. It manufactures a new object—the declared asset—from a prior practice.
Hence the political force of the gesture. A BIC declaration allows a decision made today, by a specific administration with a specific majority, to be presented as a simple recognition of a continuity originating from the past. What is a choice of the present is cloaked as heritage. And it is far more difficult to argue against heritage than against a choice.
3. The four operations of the mechanism
If one examines the procedure closely, the declaration links four operations, and none are neutral.
It selects. Not all culture attains BIC status; the regulation demands relevance and due process. This signifies that the declaration produces differentiation: one practice enters the reinforced regime of protection, and all others remain outside. Those excluded may interpret this, with justification, as a policy of cultural preference, particularly when the declaration is accompanied by subsidies and public promotion.
It translates. The file requires a technical report that rewrites the practice in the language of heritage: rootedness, identity, intergenerational transmission, bearer community, associated knowledge, territory. This translation is not innocent. It tends to illuminate the aspects of continuity and belonging within the practice, while obscuring those of conflict. A contested activity enters the form and emerges transformed into tradition.
It inscribes. The asset is entered into official registers and files. It gains institutional stability: it ceases to depend on social memory or the advocacy of a sector and acquires a stable administrative existence. That which is inscribed appears, by the very fact of its inscription, less debatable.
Shift the frame. This is the decisive operation. When a living practice enters the heritage regime, the nature of the inquiry changes. It moves from 'should this continue to be done?' or 'what value does it hold?' to different questions: 'how is it safeguarded?', 'who transmits it?', 'which administration must protect it?'. The conflict does not vanish, but its grammar is altered. What was once a subject of deliberation becomes a subject of guardianship. And one does not deliberate upon guardianship: one complies with it.
4. Bullfighting, already patrimonialised
The bullfighting case is illustrative because the operation has already been performed once, at a state level. Law 18/2013 regulated bullfighting as cultural heritage; its preamble describes it as part of the common historical and cultural heritage of the Spanish people and as a sign of collective identity whose preservation is the responsibility of public authorities. The Constitutional Court, in annulling the Catalan ban on bullfights in 2016, confirmed state competence over the matter. The practice was thus shielded: to challenge its restriction necessitates, first, challenging its status as protected heritage.
What Extremadura now proposes is to add an autonomous layer to that protection. According to the regional press, the relevant minister announced the promotion of the BIC status, attributing to the sector an economic impact exceeding 28 million euros, more than one thousand jobs, and over 120 livestock farms—figures derived from political statements rather than an independent study—alongside a specific allocation of 700,000 euros. It is an announcement, not a consummated declaration. Yet as an announcement, it already reveals the logic: legal protection, public funding, and regional identity articulated in a single movement.
This is not an isolated case within the community. At the end of 2025, proceedings were initiated there to declare decoy partridge hunting an Asset of Cultural Interest, as intangible cultural heritage, at the request of the hunting federation. The resolution bases the initiation on historical roots, symbolic and identity-related dimensions, intergenerational transmission, knowledge, and specialised lexicon. It is the same procedure of translation: a contested hunting practice reappears as a ritual, a bearer community, minor craftsmanship, and oral tradition. The vocabulary of heritage absorbs the controversy.
5. What this is not
I do not maintain that the Asset of Cultural Interest is illegitimate, nor that patrimonialisation is inherently fraudulent. The mechanism fulfils real and necessary functions: there is fragile heritage that would be lost without protection. Neither do I maintain that every patrimonialised practice is conflictive; flamenco entered the UNESCO list in 2010 without anyone perceiving it as a shield against critics, because it lacked them in the same sense. The issue is not the tool, but the usage. And the usage becomes problematic when the mechanism is applied not following a consensus, but precisely where consensus is absent—when it serves to settle, via administrative channels, a discussion that society has not concluded.
Neither do I assert intentions. I need not attribute a deliberate plan of manipulation to anyone. The mechanism functions even if each actor believes in good faith that they are merely protecting something of value. That is precisely its efficacy: it requires no cynicism to operate. It requires only a procedure and a word—heritage—which performs, without clamour, work that would otherwise necessitate argumentation.
6. Why it matters to me
I have been maintaining in this Notebook that institutional validation does not reflect a pre-existing value: it produces it. The framework does not accompany the work; to a large extent, it constitutes it. The BIC is an almost textbook example of this thesis, applied to the legal domain. It does not certify that something is heritage; it transforms it into heritage, and in doing so, it reorganises the entire field of what can be said about it.
This does not decide who is right at the heart of the matter—whether bullfighting should continue or not, or whether hunting with decoys deserves protection. These are legitimate and open discussions. What the mechanism does is prior and more subtle: it decides the terms upon which the discussion may take place, and who bears the burden of proof. Once something is heritage, those who wish to conserve it need only invoke the word; those who dispute it must dismantle an inheritance. This asymmetry is not produced by the value of the practice. It is produced by the status.
For this reason, it is appropriate to name it. Not to prevent cultural assets from being declared—far from it—but so that, when an administration converts a disputed practice into protected heritage, society retains something that the declaration tends to withdraw: the possibility of continuing to inquire. Recognising how the mechanism operates does not close the debate. On the contrary: it is the condition for the debate to continue existing. And as long as there are those who ask, no word, however solemn it may sound, suffices to conclude the conversation.
One final point, in the first person. Describing how a mechanism operates is not to endorse it. That the heritage apparatus can shield a practice does not signify that every practice merits such shielding, nor that the word 'culture' suffices to justify what would otherwise be indefensible. Art and tradition explain many things; they do not excuse them all. And a society that invokes heritage to avoid accountability for its actions—regarding the territory, animals, or what it teaches others to admire—is not protecting its culture: it is using it as an alibi. Recognising the mechanism is, therefore, also a refusal of that alibi.
On the open conversation
This text intersects with a line of inquiry I have been pursuing: how institutions validate and, by validating, produce. Should anyone wish to intervene from the perspectives of heritage law, cultural anthropology, public administration, or the practice of BIC dossiers, the notebook remains open.
See also: What a child learns to admire.
Sources
Spain. Law 16/1985, of 25 June, on the Spanish Historical Heritage. Official State Gazette (BOE) no. 155, 29/06/1985. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1985-12534
Spain. Law 18/2013, of 12 November, for the regulation of Bullfighting as cultural heritage. Official State Gazette (BOE) no. 272, 13/11/2013. https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2013-11837
Spain. Law 10/2015, of 26 May, for the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Official State Gazette (BOE) no. 126, 27/05/2015. https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2015-5794
Autonomous Community of Extremadura. Law 2/1999, of 29 March, on the Historical and Cultural Heritage of Extremadura. Official State Gazette (BOE) no. 139, 11/06/1999. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1999-13022
Autonomous Community of Extremadura. Resolution of 4 November 2025, initiating the procedure for the declaration of Asset of Cultural Interest for 'Decoy partridge hunting in Extremadura'. DOE no. 220, 14/11/2025; BOE no. 18, 20/01/2026 (BOE-A-2026-1378).
Constitutional Court. Judgment 177/2016, of 20 October. ECLI:ES:TC:2016:177.
Government of Extremadura. “Declaration of Asset of Cultural Interest…” Procedure SIA 213555. https://www.juntaex.es/w/5024
UNESCO (2010). “Flamenco”. Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. https://ich.unesco.org/es/RL/el-flamenco-00363
Smith, Laurajane (2006). Uses of Heritage. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203602263
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1995). “Theorizing Heritage”. Ethnomusicology, 39(3), 367–380. https://doi.org/10.2307/924627
Tunbridge, J. E.; Ashworth, G. J. (1996). Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. John Wiley.
Harrison, Rodney (2013). Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203108857
El Periódico Extremadura (11/06/2026). 'Extremadura to promote bullfighting as an Asset of Cultural Interest and increase subsidies sixfold.'
Canal Extremadura (11/06/2026). 'The Regional Government will promote bullfighting as an Asset of Cultural Interest and double its funding.'