The Long Way to Landscape Character Protection
Abstract: The landscape character protection in its current form was enshrined in the Nature and Landscape Protection Act in 1992. Yet even today, after thirty years of the current legislation, voices are being heard questioning the protection of landscape character as a kind of modern invention, or they are not aware of this instrument at all. The author's long experience in the practice of landscape character assessment and teaching, not only in regular undergraduate studies, but also in continuing education courses for civil servants and employees of private companies, shows that this is a necessary and important topic. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that the interest in landscape character (landscape character), which is related to the perception and evaluation of nature and landscape, its aesthetic appreciation and its subsequent protection, has a long development. A positive aesthetic evaluation of the landscape is not in itself something "natural", but the result of a long cultural development in Europe. In fact, the term "landscape character" itself began to be commonly used in the literature as early as the 19th century. The milieu of the improvement societies with their emphasis on the protection of the homeland (Heimatschutz) is important for its foreignization at that time. Landscape character in the contemporary concept is already described quite aptly by Ladislav Žák in his The Habitable Region (1947). The beginning of the 20th century also brought the first attempts to enshrine the protection of the landscape and its character in legislation (1908, 1911), which was done in 1920 with the Allocation Act. However, a comprehensive legal norm has to wait until 1955, when the first State Nature Protection Act is adopted. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to emphasize that the protection of landscape character (character, appearance of the landscape) has a legislative tradition of more than a century in our country and an even much longer professional tradition, that it is a traditional instrument of nature and landscape protection, which plays an important role in it.
