Change of the coast

Augustas Lapinkas, Maria Meireles e Michael Janssens de Varebeke

Pedrinhas is a heritage site, situated in the Northern part of Portugal, on the coast of an Atlantic Ocean, between the Cavado river delta and Apulia. The coastline there is experiencing heavy coastal erosion mainly caused by environmentally-inattentive engineering solutions, carried out on the local water systems since 1947, thus endangering the ancestry vernacular architecture of Pedrinhas, of which the oldest examples are discussed to be dating back to the 4^th century. We have carried a careful research on the territory and developed a package of landscape, environmental, architectural and infrastructural design proposals that would form a new urban territory planning solution, created to minimize the coastal erosion processes and restore the disturbed balance of the local ecosystem and its cycles, that managed to perfectly support the Historical Village for more than 15 centuries before the harmful coastal engineering solutions had been carried out and brought it to the current circumstances.

The main challenges:

To reduce the coastal erosion and preserve the heritage;

To safely introduce a new ecosystem and restore the balance;

To provide the responsible leisure solutions to the first-coast territory;

To provide the responsive urban planning solutions to the second-coast territory.