Alfafar, um "lugar deslembrado" da Ladeia: Contributos para a leitura do território-fronteira a sul do Mondego

Abstract

This dissertation develops a research study on the historical and architectural reality of the village of Alfafar (district of Coimbra, municipality of Penela), relating it to the military and administrative context of the former micro-territory of Ladeia and the dynamics responsible for the occupation of the area south of the river Mondego, developed by the different cultural agents who settled there, from prehistoric times until the rise of King Afonso Henriques. In this way, the study contemplates three distinct moments of territorial analysis, articulating them through a sequence of gradual approaches from the regional scale to the local microcosm. Initially, the patterns of rupture and permanence of the defining axes of land-use planning south of the Mondego are identified, as well as how they related to the main architectural structures of their time. The orographic and geopolitical condition of this region gives it the designation of source territory, in which Ladeia plays a particularly important role as an intensely contested space during the Christian Reconquest movement. In this sense, new perspectives are put forward that articulate the critical reading of coeval documentation mapped using drawing and cartographic representation tools, shedding new light on the characterization of this micro-territory, in which the village of Alfafar is located. In this work, the village of Alfafar serves as a case study of a very old settlement that has so far remained outside the scope of systematic research focused on its history and architectural heritage. The lack of any monographic study devoted entirely to it contrasts with its presence, albeit sparse, in Christian medieval documentation, in which it appears associated with the names of important Portuguese royal and noble figures and an important military plot. The gradual process of abandonment and decharacterization that this village has undergone over the last two centuries has indolently consigned Alfafar to a state of chronic identity oblivion, turning it into an old and unremembered place. 1 The succession of these conditions emphasizes the need to restore Alfafar's value through a well-founded approach, capable of articulating the documentary reading of the village, either through cartographic resources in its relational spatialization, or through the observation and drawn record of its vernacular architecture; and with the respective contextualization on the scale of the Ladeia micro-territory and the region south of the Mondego.