The Atlantic beech forests are the more extensive and better conserved natural forest type in the north of Spain. However, this extensive presence is quite recent, due to expansion all through Europe following the last glaciation. This type of forests is the result of intensive interaction with the human intervention. Those idyllic forests, characterised by straight trunks without branches, clean appearance and a ground cover of fallen leaves that form a carpet are the result of a type of forest management that has been carried out for centuries. Those forests are generally with a regular structure and most of the trees belong to the same age class.
Nevertheless, this is not the reality of most of the beech forest of the west pyrenees regions. Most forests are located in mountain areas with difficult access. Hence, the forests have not been actviely managed for many decades, so now their structure is semirregular with mixed ages and species. Until the sixties, the forests were managed to obtain firewood and this is why many trees orignate from sprouts. Nowadays, it has got several economical final uses such as woodpulp, furnitures, parquet.
Live stock is often present in these mountain forests and this has resulted in stability problems.The future the management of this forests should be adapted to maintain their important protection function. Any harvesting should be carried out using cable cranes or similar technologies to protect the environment and the soils. These interventions should be oriented to obtain high quality and large dimension stems, minimizing the intermediate clearing operations.

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The Atlantic Pirenees are where the eurosiberian, mediterranean and alpine vegetation meet together in an area of high mountains with a diverse landscape. These two factors result in a wide diversity of habitat for many different types of forest. For example, ledge forests in the bottom of rocky walls, mixed broadleaf forests in the valley bottoms, beech and beech-fir forest in the humid hillsides. Scots pine forests are present on the poorer sites on the sunny hillsides of the south slope, and finally open mountain pine forests occupies the rocky and high altitude slopes, forming forests with high ecological and protection value. Within all of the forests there are pasture lands that the human activity has benefited from during the centuries, and where in summer the sheep flocks of both sides of the mountains graze peacefully to produce the cheese of the region.
Beech forests widely covers both sides of the border up to an altitude of 1800 meters and is perfectly adapted to the humid climate of the Atlantic regions. An example of such crossborder forest is the emblematic Iraty Forest with 20.000 ha located on both sides of the border, but mainly in Navarra.

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