A display of comparison pictures taken 48 years apart has been launched by Albufeira council as part of its ‘houses with history’ project
The 39 ‘then and now’ pictures taken in and around Albufeira form the same points show well known and emblematic places in the city.
"Places of Memory" reveals a photographic trove taken in 1966, in the early days of tourism in the Algarve, by architect Cabeça Padrão. The same locations were photographed earlier this year.
The 1966 photographs were taken to record the heritage of the urban core of the city and now, "By accessing the website you can compare some of the most iconic buildings and places in the city in 1966, and now in 2014. The 39 images that make up the digital display illustrate the heritage of the village, as Albufeira then was in the early days of tourism in the Algarve."
Cabeça Padrão's wider studies showed that in the 1930s and 1940s Albufeira suffered a decrease in its commercial activities, as has happened with many Algarve villages, despite the collective memory of the ‘good old Salazar days’ as being a time of prosperity.
During this period factories closed down and economic activities disappeared with such apparent finality that people turned to fishing only as a subsistence activity, an activity that the current government currently is emphasising as a way out of our economic woes.
In the early 1960's along came the phenomenon of tourism. It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Albufeira really boomed with an exponential increase in the number of tourists and the urban environment in which to house them.
In the words of Cabeça Padrão, this time was one of "monstrous urban renewal."
