A Window back out on the old Village. The story of the Aldeia da Luz

1.

The Aldeia da Luz [Village of Light] is a small Portuguese hamlet deep in the heart of the agricultural farmlands and vineyards of rural Alentejo. I should be clear and say that I am talking about the new Aldeia da Luz and not the original village. The old aldeia met its fate when it was demolished, flooded, and submerged under water—the culmination of a-half-a-century-old public works project to create a regional water reservoir by building the Aquelva Dam in the middle of agricultural farmland.

The old Village of Light was settled in the midst of the fertile basin about the Rio Guadiana, an historically important trade and agricultural river traversed and traveled for millennia. Plans to dam the river were hatched in the 1950s by the Portuguese fascist Estado Novo Dictatorship, with political and business interests in hydroelectric power and agriculture keeping the project alive before and after Portugal’s 1974 revolution. The plan intended to provide electricity for the growing agricultural needs of the region and increase water available for farming. Complicating the proponents’ ends, however, was the existence of this small village, which was located inside the perimeter of the 100 square mile flood basin that engineers had determined would be created once the dam closed off the Guadiana’s waters. If the project were to move forward, the villagers would have to agree to permanently abandon their homes and allow their aldeia to be flooded over.

Political and legal pressure was mounted over generations, with those hoping to build the dam pitching their project to the residents of the village by casting them as regional and national heroes and celebrating them in popular narratives as martyrs for the public good. The decision to either refuse the project or allow it to move forward was not easy. The settlement had been a home and focal point of the social lives of the inhabitants, a community of relatives and neighbors that had survived, lived, and thrived, side-by-side for multiple generations.

The geographic area to be flooded around the Aldeia da Luz, had itself been inhabited for thousands of years, with further archaeological evidence dating habitation in the region as far back as 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic period, and even as early as end of the Paleolithic.[1] Given this history, the project also required time to conduct extensive archaeological survey and artifact recovery projects in the region before the land could be submerged under water when accessibility to these historic sites would be complicated.

As the legal maneuverings by the key power interests in industry and those representing them in Parliament played out against the sentiments, mythologies, and arguments over the material and spiritual well-being of the local villagers, the Aldeia da Luz was placed at the complex center of competing national, regional, and local narratives. Arguments and emotions were exhausted over decades as a sustained discussion and a series of community votes cemented their decision to allow the project to move forward. In turn, the villagers were cast as victims of hegemonic power processes, as altruistic, as supererogating national heroes, and even as cagey negotiators who held out long enough to wrangle a good-enough deal from the government. Whatever the stated reasons of the many individuals who collectively decided to support the project, it is also true that inevitability can make a true believer out of anyone.

As part of their agreement, the villagers refused any kind of direct cash payment to leave. Their refusal was driven by the feeling that a monetary pay-out would force the residents to buy homes elsewhere in an exodus that would send families who had lived side-by-side for centuries to re-settle in far flung locations. Such an outcome would have resulted not only in the physical destruction of their homes but also in the disintegration of the social connections that had molded and sustained the village as well. In this decision, the residents of the Aldeia da Luz were bonded though an idea of community as not only a physical space, but also a place of both practical and spiritual connections to family and friends that had extended through centuries.

Guided by this notion, they agreed to accept the engineers plan only if their homes and properties could be reconstructed in a new location that would use the basic proxemic scheme of the old village as a general model. Designed prior to the flooding and constructed after further input and concessions from the villagers, the new aldeia wasn’t an exact copy of the old village. Their new houses were, of course, built with contemporary tools and techniques and were outfitted with modernized appliances and utility technologies. The internal space and flow of the village was also designed under modern architectural principles that took into consideration cars, traffic flow, and contemporary ideas about the creation and use of public spaces, resulting in a more open and linear scheme than had previously evolved in the old village as it grew over centuries. By relocating the village in this way, however, it was hoped that the social connections among the inhabitants in the aldeia would remain, even as the buildings of the old village were dismantled.

Once built and ready for habitation, the villagers packed up their belongings and moved to their new settlement about two kilometers away situated at what would be the lip of the planned reservoir basin. They removed important objects and artifacts from their homes to take to the new aldeia—old iron work, doors, and roof tiles. The sixteenth century church in the old aldeia was brought down stone by stone and then its tower was rebuilt in the middle of the new settlement; they moved the cemetery intact, carrying with them the bones of their dead ancestors. They made a copy of a fountain that shared with the community the waters of what was traditionally held as a sacred and miraculous spring and put up the replica in the new village.

By the time I had first even heard about the place, the old Aldeia da Luz was already underwater and the only images of life in the original village I experienced were through a film by Catarina Mourão documenting the move. Affecting cinematography captured the villagers’ preparations to leave, with one image in the film staying with me over the years.

In it, an old woman is alone in her house, preparing to leave for the last time before the flooding. All of her belongings had already been removed to the new village and she is dressed in long skirts while she jerks a broom through the rooms and the kitchen of her house. In what was a decades old daily ritual, she swept, now clearing dust from the empty floors of an empty house that was about to get torn down anyway. Undeterred by her awareness of her home's soon-to-be-met fate, the velhota dug into corners and under the moldings and around door jams, pacing her feet down the hall until she eventually swept her way out the front door.

Once she and the other villagers had finished relocating their belongings, said goodbye to their old homes, and settled into their new village, workers came and tore down the Aldeia da Luz. They razed the buildings, the cafés and clubs, the public praça, and reduced the village to rubble. As the dwellings came down, the town was encircled with an enormous steel fence—an act that symbolically and physically sealed away the aldeia from its inhabitants making of it a protected memory space, a locked away room. Then the engineers closed the flood gates on the dam and let the waters slowly rise. What was left of the original Aldeia da Luz was now buried in a corral shaped, sub-aquatic tomb.

[1] See, for example the literature review in Luis Gomes and Alexandre Varanda. “As Indústrias Paleolíticas do Baixo Guadiana: Perspetivas para uma Investigação Futura a Partir das Recolhas de Abel Viana,” at Arqueologia em Portugal-2017, Estado da Questão (Associação dos Arqueólogos Portugueses: Lisboa, 2017), 341-355.

2.

A short time after the flooding of the old Aldeia da Luz, and a couple of months after I moved to Lisbon, I received an invitation to come to the new aldeia to celebrate the launching of Luz é Agua [Luz (Light) and Water] a book that formed part of a multi-media project chronicling the lives of the villagers as they were displaced and then re-settled by the building of the dam.

My host was the book’s author, Clara Saraiva, who was from Lisbon, but who I had known for many years when we were friends back when she lived for a time in Providence. A fellow anthropologist, Clara had been working with the villagers for almost a decade and with the book’s publication, friends of hers and others working on the project came together at the museum in the new aldeia to unveil it to the residents who had participated in its writing. The Lisbon crowd out in the country, partying down with about 100 villagers to celebrate the book that told their story. These kinds of public university events are often marked by a measure of posturing, artificial bonhomie; the weird Lisbon corner of European academia is no different. But there was something genuine and sincere about this event and one couldn’t help but be caught up in the villagers' displays of emotion as they relived with one another the experience of their relocation.

The book launching served as a memorial service of sorts, not only for the Aldeia da Luz residents who had died since the move, but also as a memorial for the village itself. The book was a historical chronicle of the trauma, one that captured stories of emotional rupture, physical loss, and rebuilding. The party celebrating its publication also served as an aldeia-wide social gathering, it’s largest since the move, at a time when the residents were still re-configuring their new community.

At the museum, we all broke bread in a classic alto Alentejo spread put out for our serious consumption, including local Alentejo wines and liquors, gooey and nutty soft cheeses, heavy sour-dough baked pão alentejano, pastries, pies, sweets, and locally cultivated honey. It was all a fine appetizer before everyone went out for dinner afterwards.

With the collections concept designed to help the villagers recover their past, that night, the modern architecture museum where the book launching took place was as much a church as it was a public exhibition gallery. Filled with personal artifacts from the old village and archaeological findings from the surveys conducted in the broader region flooded by the dam, there was a trove of fetishistic objects on display, a bell, an awl, a basket, a chair, etc. A shrine to an ancestral home through wood, iron, and clay—the venerated objects from lost worlds.

Among all of the displays though, was one popular exhibition that drew a long line of people stretching down along a wall of the gallery in the direction of a small window. Looking at all the people, and not understanding the attraction, I did what everyone does when they see a line in Portugal, and I stood in it. The front of the queue was tucked into an interior cleft corner of the museum building, onlookers pressing forward one at a time, stepping into a concrete frame to look out of a small pane of glass positioned at an uncomfortable angle in the museum's wall. One at a time, the line moved forward as each new person ducked under the cowl of the frame, like climbing inside a Victoria era camera obscura, minus the hot exploding pop flash of a pan of powder.

When it was my turn at the front of the line, I poked my head forward. One's view out the window sloped down a hill over an expanse of the reservoir basin, a small stand of trees in the foreground, and in the distance an empty patch of water. It was all lovely enough, but I still couldn’t figure out the attraction of that particular window, especially as the whole reservoir was on dramatic display just outside the museum's door.

Pulling my head from the box, however, is when the flash went off. I noticed a landscape photo of the old Aldeia da Luz that hung next to the window. There it was, its homes, its church steeple, its fountain, its silhouette against the sky, a photo taken before the building of the dam and subsequent flood. Given the slope of the hill and the position of the trees in both the picture and the actual terrain, it was clear that the photo had been taken from the exact same spot where one now looked out that window in the museum.

Your head inside the concrete frame, taking in the bucolic scene, the surface of the water, staring at nothing and everything and what lies beneath. Sticking your head in here, it comes out over there, gazing through a window back out on the old village through a portal of the inescapable present. One could see the distance across the short meters separating their homes in the old Aldeia da Luz from where the new one was built; but for those who had lived there and left, this was not a journey to be measured with a tape.

3.

The celebration that night carried out of the museum toward a restaurant located on the other side of the new village. As I walked from the museum in the early evening, I saw that the wide streets of the aldeia were mostly empty—although some folks had gathered in cafés and a couple of kids were hanging around in a park smoking cigarettes and riding a bicycle. I wondered if the village was empty because most everyone had maybe gone to the museum. Later I understood that one reason for the lack of many people on the streets was that certain kinds of socializing had suffered in the new village as a result of the move.

A resident of the aldeia told me that the layout of the old village, with gardens abutting homes that were built closely together, encouraged neighbors to peer over fences and traipse across back yards to share conversations over walls and flowers. The admittedly dilapidated, tiny, and musty homes that had once encouraged the residents to go outside to talk to one another in the old Aldeia had been replaced with bigger houses apportioned with modern fixtures. Content with roomier, pristine living quarters, the residents, apparently, were often much happier just staying alone inside their new comfortable homes.

On that night, though, the conversations and celebration at the museum continued when we arrived for dinner. We ate in a new restaurant with an old cook. Sopa de alentejana was ladled out of big kettles into your bowl right at your seat, grilled meats were served up on table-sized platters, and red country house wines from adjacent vineyards were poured into cups. I don’t remember what we had for dessert, but like all Portuguese tascas I am certain flan and arroz doce were among the assortment of choices. I do remember that by the time we had gotten to drinking the post-meal aguardentes, we had been joined by a group of local musicians. This folião (as one might have called them in another time, some even did that night) was a small conjunto of a guitarra, an acordeão, and singers, who played some songs and roughed out quadras telling stories in rhymes. Passing time with friends and family over food, wine and song, a night spent like countless other nights, an analog of the old aldeia in the new one.

Sitting at the table I looked at people I knew who had come together from other parts of Portugal, a number of whom I had even sat with before, at similar tables back in New England. Like the villagers, I suppose I felt that I had also moved to a different place only to be surrounded by the same people.

As we all sat there drinking and laughing, I wondered how far away it is you can be from home in those moments where it seems like you never even left.

The window back out on the old village is visible on the concrete wall (between the trees) in the photo.

#alentejo #portugal #aldeiadaluz #travelwriting #museu