Photography, Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes, and Tourism Urbanization: A Narrative Focused on Hotel do Garbe, Armação de Pêra, Algarve, Portugal

Abstract

This article is focused on the use of photography to characterize land-cover and land-use changes in a 7.59 km2 study area centered on Hotel do Garbe, in the village of Armação de Pêra, Algarve, Portugal. Orthorectified vertical aerial, oblique aerial and ground-level photographs were the main data sources required to carry out the analysis. In a preliminary approach, a conventional research design was adopted. Based on the available orthorectified vertical aerial photographs, a sixty-year time series, with four homogeneously distributed steps (1958, 1978, 1997 and 2018), was constructed, and maps were produced to support the description of the changes that have taken place. To deepen the analysis, photographs from fourteen picture postcards were recognized as a useful source of information, and the authors of these photographs were considered “involuntary or accidental photo-geographers” whose work was relevant to feed a case study in which human geography and landscape biography sciences are the main narrative axes. The final result proved to be richer than the interpretation only based on the orthorectified vertical aerial photographs, and the importance of combining photographs taken from different points of view, with different aims and for different recipients is highlighted.