Contribución al estudio del patrimonio de Cacela: cartografía, arquitectura y paisaje en el contexto del algarve oriental en Portugal

Abstract

This article focuses on the old cartography of Cacela, in southern Portugal, with the aim of reinterpreting its transformationover time, considering thematics such as architecture, urbanism and landscape simultaneously. The understandingof this transformation is marked by major maps and plans of Cacela, that coincide with the beginning ofthe seventeenth century, the nearing of the end of the Ancien Regime and the transition from the nineteenth to thetwentieth century, associating each of these times to a particular mode of representation. The interpretation of thesedifferent maps is combined with the reading of historic written sources of each period, culminating in the design of afinal plan that represents the reconstitution of the urban area and the landscape of Cacela in the middle of the twentiethcentury. This work is part of a broader research on small clusters in different geographic subunits of southernPortugal, which includes the study of landscape and urban form as well as the full survey of the entire settlement. Itconfirms Cacela as a small town in the historic scattered population of the lower Algarve, subjected to a significanttransformation between the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century.