The highly pertinent perspective of an architect

The architect Pedro Novo, president of the Lisbon and Tagus Valley Regional Section of the Order of Architects, wrote the following article about Quinta dos Ingleses, published in Jornal CONSTRUIR  (issue no. 562).

"The Pine Forest of Carcavelos

There is a pine forest in Carcavelos planted at the beginning of the 20th century. A trapezium-shaped bastion of nature by the coastline, with the Sintra mountains in the background. It is the last continuous woodland of the Estoril Coast, fifty-two hectares of permeable soil just a few metres from the beach, a refuge for hundreds of species that must serve as a weighting factor for a balanced occupation of the municipality's southern coast, whether in terms of urban planning or the relationship between the natural and the built environment.

There is a pine forest in Carcavelos that was once a vineyard. Quinta Nova de Santo António, founded in the 18th century, was a leisure and production estate of the lords of Alagoa, from which countless barrels of the famous Carcavelos wine emerged. Between 1808 and 1812, it served as a stronghold to the rear of the São Julião da Barra fort, on the third line of the Lines of Torres Vedras built against Napoleon, and in 1832 it became a military barracks once again during the wars between absolutists and liberals. Later, in 1878, it saw phylloxera reduce its vineyard to a mere thirty hectares.

There is a pine forest in Carcavelos that owes its name to the English. From 1870 onwards, the first submarine telegraph cables moored in Portugal departed from there, and with the telegraph companies came the British employees who settled in the area. It was they who got the country playing football on a dirt pitch, and it was in the estate's manor house that Saint Julian's School was established at the beginning of the 20th century. The name remained, the school remained, and the pine forest remained, planted by those very same people between 1900 and 1920.

There is a pine forest in Carcavelos where building attempts have been made for over sixty years. The first opposition came from Salazar's Minister of Public Works, who halted the operation. Decades of rejected projects followed, as they never gathered the necessary approvals. Only in 2014 was the Detailed Plan for the Urban Restructuring Space of South Carcavelos (PPERUCS) approved by a margin of a single vote, with the then-president of the Carcavelos Parish Council voting against the majority position of her Assembly. Sixty years of refusals and a one-vote advantage. This is the basis of legitimacy invoked today as if it were a consensus. It is worth stating what results from this, because that is where the arithmetic becomes indecent. Eight hundred and fifty flats in plots rising up to seven storeys above ground and five below, hotels, and commercial areas. Out of five hundred and forty thousand square metres of green area, less than one hundred thousand remain; of these, twenty thousand are on the other side of the road and eighty thousand encompass the riverbed, playing fields, and car parks. What is left is little more than an enclosed garden, in exchange for woodland equivalent to around twelve Praça do Comércio squares.

There is a pine forest in Carcavelos where the owners will claim they have the right to build. Owning land has never granted the right to develop it, because development rights arise from a public act of spatial planning, entrusted to the State and municipalities to arbitrate the balance between private interest and the common good. And planning has a hierarchy, which is inverted here, because a detailed plan cannot contradict those that are superior to it. The CCDR of Lisbon and Tagus Valley itself stated that the PPERUCS was drawn up based on the reality of 2011 and flouts current regulations, leaving it to Cascais Municipal Council to revoke it. What is being exercised here is no longer planning; it is alleged administrative discretion—the faculty to choose what is verified, what is ignored, and, above all, when decisions are made.

Biodiversity established a century ago is lost, and the carbon that these trees took a hundred years to capture is released all at once. Soil permeability is lost and wind regimes are altered, accelerating the erosion of the largest beach between Lisbon and Cascais. Above all, what Article 66 of the Constitution mandates to protect is lost: a human living environment and the architectural quality of settlements, which is a matter of fundamental rights and not of urban planning negotiation.

The landscape has ceased to be an aesthetic category and has become an instrument of urban and climate policy. The European Landscape Convention, ratified by Portugal in 2005, obliges the State to legally recognise it as an essential component of the human environment, in line with the constitutional precept, and to integrate it into spatial planning policies. This applies to all landscapes, not just those that have already been classified. Continuous woodland of this scale moderates temperatures along the entire Coast and retains water that a sealed soil returns to the network in minutes; defending it is not nostalgia, it is the most elementary manifestation of technical and scientific knowledge on these matters, and it is the cheapest and most immediate adaptation measure available to the territory. No built infrastructure will have the capacity to restore or mimic what a hundred years of growth have created.

This was the position established by the UIA XXIX World Congress of Architects in Barcelona last July. The Barcelona Declaration, read out at the closing ceremony, begins by stating that the planet does not negotiate, and out of the six commitments it sets out, two relate directly to what is at stake here: that every layout on the territory is space that is either taken away from or preserved for other species, and that every act of building has consequences that go beyond its own limits. It would be strange, though not that strange around these parts, if Cascais Municipal Council were to decide now, in the exact opposite direction, against the understanding and recommendation of experts from one hundred and thirty countries.

An Estate for which there is no shortage of ways out, perhaps only a lack of will. The Assembly of the Republic approved by a majority the classification of the area as a protected landscape, and the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests itself recognised that nothing prevents a local classification, which falls to the municipality. There are funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan to rehabilitate green areas. There is land swapping for plots with development capacity, there is the transfer of development rights through equalization, and there is expropriation, the value of which, in the absence of an agreement, is determined by the court, exactly as occurred with the adjacent land where Nova SBE stands today.

There is a pine forest in Carcavelos... it was planted by people who did not live to see it fully grown, and it has resisted two wars, a plague, and half a century of urban plans. It is heritage and, by extension, it is also wealth! No generation has the right to be the last to enjoy it..."

Pedro Novo, in Jornal CONSTRUIR no. 562