Programmatic pillar Identity -  Lived Territories

Curated by Vírgilo Pereira Borges

Walk oriented by Jorge Ricardo Pinto

Oriental Porto encompasses a city that developed in the shadow of the main urban centre, providing a unique setting for the long-term analysis of Porto’s expansion. This tour offers an immersion in the so-called "invisible city", revealing the physical traces that remain of the morphological and social transition that took place throughout the 19th century. Between the splendour of Romanticism and the advent of nineteenth-century industrialisation, the area comprising the suburban outskirts and the former country estates underwent a profound transformation. On the one hand, a new economic elite (notably the liberal bourgeoisie and the Brazilian returnees) left its mark on the landscape, manifested in romantic suburban architecture, mansions and thoroughfares open to modernity. On the other hand, within the same geographical context, the working-class neighbourhoods proliferated, evident in the communal and informal atmosphere of the "islands". 

Through a walking tour that begins in the 19th-century heart of Largo de Soares dos Reis and culminates in the morphological resilience of the old village of Lomba, participants are invited to decipher the layers of this metamorphosis. The itinerary explores the role of deindustrialisation and the fronts of modernity generated by the railway and by welfare and industrial facilities, contrasting the former opulence of the views over the meandering Douro with the informality of the "hidden city". More than a mere historical retrospective, the tour offers a critical interpretation of the contemporary urban landscape, drawing on the enduring elements and the scars left by a 19th century that was both industrial and romantic, and which decisively shaped Campanhã’s identity.