Data: 2006/...

Localização: Herdade das Valadas, Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal

Área: 62 ha

Cliente: Sousa Cunhal - Turismo

Coordenadores de projecto:
João Ferreira Nunes, Iñaki Zoilo

Colaboradores de projecto:
Carlos Ribas, Ana Marques, Helena Palma, Marta Palha, Jan Derveaux, Sara Neves, Raquel Meireles

Arquitectura:
Promontório, Sergison Bates, JLCG arquitectos, Peter Maerkli, José Paulo dos Santos

Consultores:
Afa consult, Englis Lda.

From the celebration of the wine and of the vineyard landscape stems a low density tourism programme, centred on the concept of wine resort. The desired image for this project's landscape, located in Herdade das Valadas, is not the reestablishment of a rural landscape, but a functionally different one, for reasons related with a more contemporary and sophisticated use. The introduction of housing units has a founding character, a prime role from which emerge relationships with specific densities. The research heads towards the harmonization between the urban/tourism character and the agricultural support matrix. The fragmentation of the housing clusters is opposed to the continuous agricultural matrix. The design creates a strategy able of integrating road and hydraulic infrastructures and of defining boundaries between private and collective, without discontinuing the agricultural matrix and without transforming the landscape into an urban recreation of the rural image. The management of this matrix-based territory will be maintained through the implementation of agricultural strategies that turn it into a real agricultural territory. The denser collective area is developed around the ecological lake, an irrigation water retention basin, near which a winery was implanted. The Master Plan also solves the impact of the noise from the adjacent road with dense tree and shrub groundcover. The aim is to create a quiet paradigmatic "field", more "field-like" than the actual rural fields.