KaleidoScapes

Sustainable Landscapes of Ames: Loureiros

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Description of the landscape.

Explanation

Loureiros is a hamlet with an area of ​​57'87 hectares, its geographical location whose coordinates are 42º 52 '18.9' 'and 8º 39' 14.8 '' and orientation towards the East. It belongs to the Parish of Covas (San Estevo) of the City Council of Ames.
It is a small place with a good road at its entrance, it is next to the AG-56 motorway, so it can be considered that it has a good communication network with other urban centers.
Its structure corresponds to a road that allows access to the nucleus and then, within it there is a street between houses.
The buildings are small unifamily houses (there are no tall buildings) with gardens, closed with low walls. Altogether they are 31 houses, two of them in ruinous state.
Its typology shows a traditional closed nucleus, with some of the inhabited houses (three). It seems to be, that the oldest house appears as a large stone rural house with several annexes (bearing in mind that they already lived in it according to the neighbors in the year 1740), and a huge horreo of stone. Also it presents / displays a great Coat of arms in its main facade that represents the proprietors "Hermida", people with good social and economic position of that one time. Likewise, the first rural nucleus also consisted of four houses (some renovated nowadays), two small and two large ones, all with horreo and traditional potable water wells, including one of them today conserves a stone dovecote. The most current houses are brick and painted.
In this village so small there are four horizons, a public washer, a dovecote.
While crops we can divide it into three parts:
The first part goes from the interior to 50m, we can see vines around the small orchards grown (coles, potatoes, beans, peppers, tomatoes, corn, for their own consumption).
The second part goes from 50m to 250m, we also find vines around the farms and small gardens.
The third part goes from 250m or more, there are pine forest, eucalyptus, oak trees, earthen trees. The number of inhabitants is 72 people, of which there are 40 men and 32 women.

 

Ariadne Vázquez Trigo · 8 marzo 2018 19:24


Chronology
 The village of Loureiros is a traditional nucleus of rural character, where in the 1700s there is reference of the first neighbor who settled down and built a large stone house that has a Coat of Arms of the surname "Hermida" on the main facade, with annexes , blocks and a row of stone (about 300 years old), all surrounded by a large area of ​​cultivated land and forest. Later, other neighbors were arriving in the same area and in the 1900s, in the urban center of the village, there were already installed and inhabited five families with their stone houses with a large area of ​​cultivation around each one, consisting of a craft well of fresh water, a wash house made of stone (more than 200 years old), one of them has a pigeon or stone dove (about 300 years old). After 1960, two more homes grew considerably slow, in the 1990s, two other houses, and finally in 2000, they built a small urbanization of eleven more houses, with a garden, but its construction and brickwork and painted, already It is a contemporary construction, arriving to the present time.

Changes and permanences over time
 Over time, what changes in the Loureiros Village was the increase in houses, which currently have 31 houses, and of inhabitants that are 72 neighbors. In the past, it was a village of five houses, where its inhabitants lived from what they produced, from an agriculture or subsistence crop, they planted wheat, rye, corn, potatoes, vegetables, and livestock. A few years ago in the village there were a cow farm, a pig farm and other poultry and a store for the sale of agricultural products and feedstuffs, it could be said, that it had a sustainability economy in the Loureiros village. Nowadays there are no farms or warehouses and agriculture has been reduced to the cultivation of the garden, which is uniquely for its own consumption. It remains the same as forest conservation that surrounds the village and farms. The old houses are conserved (two of them restored and two in ruins), with their horreros, the pigeon house or pombal and the pylon.

Simmilarities and differences
The Loureiros village is small and with few buildings, the houses are unifamilies of low altitude.
There are very few inhabitants
The rural nucleus is unique, because it has a single sloping street without exit where the houses extend. As there is little vehicle circulation and little noise. There is no environmental pollution, or in such a small case as there are no industries.
Loureiros is a very quiet village, because there is no noise, and you can hear the song of the birds, since we are surrounded by field of crop and forest. There are no shops, no restaurants, or bars.
If we compare it with other similar landscapes as with another village, we already found more homes, they are a larger number of inhabitants, the nucleus is already urban, with several roads, they have more cars, and the buildings are tall buildings of several apartments, There are no fields of cultivation nor forest. There is more pollution caused by the pollution of cars, we find shops, restaurants and bars. In these other areas there is more noise.

Elements detracting from your landscape
 Decrease the environmental value of the landscape and the social value:
That there are no bus services that take the inhabitants to the urban centers of the surroundings, so it is always necessary to travel in a private vehicle.
There are not enough garbage containers, there is no recycle cardboard, plates, glass.
There are no cleaning services, because the cleaning of the street and the bins need to be done by the neighbors themselves.
Old houses that are in ruins, should be restored.
The oldest houses in the village do not have sewerage, they still use the cesspits.
In the village there is no park for children.
There is no signal on the road that indicates the address or location of the Loureiros village.

Recommendations for environment sustainability
 In order to keep the village environmentally sustainable, the first would be to create legal regulations, in case it does not hurt, to respect the countryside and the forest and the living beings that inhabit the village, and thus be able to control the felling of trees, hunting, and carry out fire protection measures. In Loureiros, this type of regulation already exists, there is also a control of the harmful products that are used to spray the field of cultivation, although in this zone they are not almost used, since the culture that exists and for own consumption and does not use harmful products.
- It is important to have a control and to close the zones that can be urbanized and to maintain the green zones or protected in their natural state.
-It would be important to make the environment more sustainable to recycle the waste produced by households in the homes, separating the rubbish in the corresponding containers in each case.
- It would be possible to use less polluting energy, such as solar energy by placing solar plates at each address.

Recommendations for social sustainability
The village of Loureiros so that it was more socially sustainable would have to establish a public transport service, such as buses so that people could go to Bertamiráns, shopping, to the doctor or to work

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