SHARED ORE, UNEQUAL BURDENS: COUNTER-MAPPING LABOUR, POWER AND HERITAGE IN THE SÃO DOMINGOS MINING LANDSCAPE

Description

The São Domingos Mine, in southeastern Portugal, is one of the most significant mining landscapes of the copper-rich Iberian Pyrite Belt. Exploited in antiquity and intensively reworked between 1854 and 1966, it produced a complex industrial territory linking extraction, processing, transport, settlement and administration. With deindustrialization, the community has changed, heritage has decayed, but memory, material traces and spatial expressions of power remain deeply embedded in the landscape.
This presentation proposes a counter-mapping reading of Mina de São Domingos as a landscape structured by unequal power relations, shaped by tensions between international ownership and local labour, polluted and protected spaces, and competing understandings of landscape as resource or as memory. It examines how labour, authority and social difference were inscribed in space through the distribution of industrial infrastructures, residential sectors, circulation routes, zones of management and control, or even space-naming. The presentation focuses in particular on the spatial expression of distinctions between elite and working-class worlds, foreign and national actors, and official and everyday uses of the mining landscape.
Drawing on archaeological observation, historical documentation and landscape analysis, we argue that this mining area functioned as a productive and living space but also as a material arrangement of plural and asymmetrical forms of power. In this sense, mapping becomes a means not only of documenting the industrial past, but also of critically re-reading the social order embedded within it, at a moment when re-use and valorization of the mine are being discussed.

Period	25 Jun 2026
Event title	Livingmaps Network Conference 2026: Shared Earth, Unequal Burdens: Living Maps for Environmental Justice
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International