The knowledge of Navarre's Heritage contextualized in History and integrated in the landscape is one of the features that has essentially defined the intellectual and journalistic work of José Javier Uranga; work carried out in a vital, profound way, accompanied by a special sensitivity and feeling.

His love for Heritage developed early, as he was the son of Mr. José Esteban Uranga, a great connoisseur of Navarrese Art, who transmitted his vocation for these subjects to him. He later expanded his training with the university degree program of Philosophy and Letters, and obtained a doctorate in History.

But his attraction for heritage was above all experiential; he knew all the monuments, but not detached from their surroundings, but integrated into the landscape that he felt with the same passion. He visited all the hermitages and their marvelous and picturesque enclaves, as I was able to verify after my cataloguing work. He collected the dedication of the hermitages to the virgins and saints, and collected the devotional engraving that accompanied these images of virgins and saints with their particular prayers and novenas -most of which are now lost-, thus demonstrating his interest in this intangible heritage, little valued at the time, which he passed on to other outstanding scholars.

Every Sunday, accompanied by a group of mountaineers, well-known people from the world of culture, he climbed mountains and sierras in the "morning" excursions until he reached the determined Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love , and so he traveled throughout Navarre. His particular interest in the Sanctuary of Ujué and his love for the Patron Saint led him to dedicate his doctoral dissertation thesis to it. He also made a study of the Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love of Gomacin, a complex construction in its antiquity.

He loved the landscape of northern and southern Navarre, and treated it with words full of sensitivity, transmitting both its strength and emotion. He discovered and felt the Bardenas like few others - its ochre colors, its characteristic geological forms - and captured it in his book Bardenas Reales: paisajes y relatos with illustrations by the Tudela painter César Muñoz Sola.

Words and painting complement each other to communicate to the reader, or to whoever visit, the poetics of the landscape. A poetics that José Javier Uranga transmits in his writings with his emotional vision of Navarre's heritage, in a landscape that changes, transforms and enriches our own gaze.