Caminho de ferro Porto-Salamanca. Dinâmicas territoriais no traçado desactivado

Abstract

Portugal has a lot of rail routes that run through areas of high landscape, historical and cultural value. However, several railways began to be deactivated, contributing to a progressive depopulation in the countryside. These suspensions leave the local populations unsupported for not complying with its main function: the mobility. No development measures were planned to offset the drop of dynamism that these deactivations triggered, which allowed these infrastructures and its associated areas to decline at plain sight. The esteem for these plentiful places that have been left abandoned conducts this study to identify the reasons that led to de closure of the railways. The degradation of these infrastructures is irreversible; the accesses are ruined, the surroundings extinguished and the region, subjected to a sociocultural confinement, enclosures on itself. Time emphasizes this stagnation, converting a place that once hosted many people to an unpopulated place. The segregation of a country, a community, a peninsula, must be reduced so the necessary improvements occur through the definition of a strategy that upgrades the cross-border relations and highlights the collective values, the patrimony and the local identity. The current situation of the deactivated railway sections must be questioned and how they can support the local communities and its development. The Douro railway line is one of the rail routes that lacks of a deserved attention not only by the existing values along the places it crosses but also because of the stark contrasts that its landscapes offer. The underlying potentials of these characteristics are relevant enough to become an engine for the development of the inland areas. The study focuses on the section between the railway stations of Pocinho and Fuente de San Esteban and proposes an intervention based on the analysis of the local values adjacent to the railway line. This infrastructure emerges as the collecting element of a global and economically autonomous system composed by several dynamic elements of the region, enabling a global perception of the diversity that exists along its endangered route.