In the death of the geographer Yves Lacoste (1929 - 2026)

PalmaWhen I began my Geography studies at the University of Barcelona, in the late sixties, the discipline was undergoing a profound transformation. The mnemonic geography of rivers, mountain ranges, and capitals was starting to give way to a much more critical way of understanding the territory. Already having finished my degree, in that intellectual environment, Horacio Capel was probably the one who introduced me to Yves Lacoste. Or, at least, the one who made me understand that this French geographer was changing the way of looking at the world. I was not his student in Paris. I was a disciple of his books. I still remember the impact that reading La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (Geography serves, first and foremost, to wage war) had on me. The title seemed like a provocation, but it hid a fundamental idea: geographical knowledge has always been a tool of power. Governments, armies, and empires have used maps to administer, control, and conquer territories, while in schools an apparently innocent geography was taught, reduced to the description of landscapes.

That reading changed the way I understood the discipline. Lacoste taught me that maps are never neutral and that behind any territory there are interests, conflicts, and political decisions. The geographer should not limit themselves to describing the world; they must try to explain why it is the way it is. Lacoste's trajectory explains this perspective. Born in Morocco, marked by the years in Algeria and by his research on the Vietnam War, he demonstrated that geography could unmask military strategies. His study of American bombings of the dikes of the Red River delta is still a masterful lesson in applied geography today. He later founded the magazine Hérodote and contributed decisively to rehabilitating geopolitics as a scientific discipline, freeing it from the prejudices it carried since World War II. For many years, I cited Lacoste in my classes. Not out of erudition, but because I continued to think that his questions were extraordinarily useful. Who controls the territory? Who makes the decisions? Who benefits? These questions served as much to explain an international conflict as to explain the transformation of Mallorca.

When I studied tourism development, coastal urbanization, or the disappearance of agricultural landscapes, I often realized that many of the intellectual tools I used came, directly or indirectly, from Lacoste. Tourism is not just an economic activity; it is also a way of organizing territory. A highway, an airport, a hotel, or a housing development are much more than infrastructures: they express a certain model of society. I have traveled through Mallorca for decades. Walking along the paths of Pla, observing the estates, the dry stone walls, the windmills, or the water tanks, I have arrived at a conviction that I fully share with Lacoste: the landscape is a document. Stones, crops, roads, and cities tell the story of a community better than many archives. The geographer does not merely observe objects; they read processes.

This is, probably, the great legacy of Yves Lacoste. He did not leave us a closed system, but a way of thinking. He taught us that territory is not a simple stage on which history unfolds. Territory is also a protagonist of history. Now that he has died, I think of that young Mallorcan student who discovered critical geography in the classrooms of the University of Barcelona. Without knowing it, he had just found one of his teachers. True teachers do not disappear when they die. They remain alive in the way we look at the world. Even today, when I unfold a map or travel through the landscapes of Mallorca, I ask myself many of the questions I learned by reading Yves Lacoste. And this is, after all, the best definition of a teacher: someone who changes our gaze forever.