Teresa M. G. Jardim, “Memória Líquida,” in Jogos Radicais (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2010), 45. Translator’s translation.
João Baptista Pereira Silva, “Brigadeiro Reinaldo Oudinot: o Engenheiro Visionário,” in Um Olhar sobre as Obras e Providências de Reinaldo Oudinot, eds. Danilo Matos et al., (Funchal: Imprensa Académica, 2018), 81. Translator’s translation.
The title of this article, “Water Flows, Stones Take,” is a popular Madeiran saying signalling the transformative power of water in a landscape that is always at the mercy of its destructive force.
Poios is the name for terraces in Madeira, engineered to optimize the agricultural cultivation of the sloping soils; their maintenance contributes to the stability of the hillsides.
In this text, the word “alluvium” is used to refer to the combination of a flood and mudslide.
Davide Baioni, “Human Activity and Damaging Landslides and Floods on Madeira Island,” Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, no. 11 (2011): 3039; Sílvia Maria Sepúlveda, Avaliação da precipitação extrema na ilha da Madeira, master’s dissertation (Lisboa: IST-UTL, 2011), 97. The author notes that the data presented in these studies do not necessarily coincide.
Silva, “Brigadeiro Reinaldo Oudinot,” 81.
Ibid.
Gonçalo Pereira Rosa, “Gestão narrativa num desastre natural: A sobreposição do discurso político no enquadramento jornalístico da enxurrada de 2010 na RTP e no jornal Público”/“The Narrative Management of a Natural Disaster: The Overlap of Political Discourse Within the Journalistic Framework of the Floods of 2010 As Shown on RTP and in the Público Newspaper” in (Dis-)Memory of Disasters: A Multidisciplinary Approach, eds. Sara Bonati et al., (Funchal: UMa-CIERL, s.d.), 108 -118.
The exhibition “Circulatory system,” ’by Martinho Mendes and David Oliveira, was presented at Galeria EspaçoMar (Funchal) in 2022. It tried to recover the importance of water-memory on Madeira island.
Various authors have surveyed the occurrence of registered landslides in Madeira since the seventeenth century. However, the data collected is merely indicative of the true scale and impact of these flash floods on the island, in that they are not systematic or ongoing long-term investigations. Quintal identifies 21 landslides of varied intensity occurring during the twentieth century and eight in the nineteenth century. See Raimundo Quintal, “Aluviões da Madeira.Séculos XIX e XX”/”Alluviums in Madeira, 19th and 20th centuries”, Territorium 6 (1999): 36-44. See also: Fernando Augusto da Silva and Carlos Azevedo de Meneses, “Aluviões,” Elucidário Madeirense, vol. 1 (Funchal, SREC, 1978): 51-55; Mariela Justina Pio Fernandes, Riscos no Concelho da Ribeira Brava movimentos de vertente cheias rápidas e (Coimbra, Universidade de Coimbra, 2009): 136-203.
Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nünning A (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 97.
Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 97.
José Gil, Portugal, Hoje: O medo de existir (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 2012).
See Reynaldo Oudinot’s proposal of 1804 below.
In response to the February 10, 2010 alluvium, for instance, the Regional Government developed a project to concrete over Funchal’s streambeds and historic retaining walls. However, a group of citizens protested, claiming that its risk-management strategies were unjustifiable and detrimental to the environmental and historical heritage of the city, stopping the project. Silva, “Brigadeiro Reinaldo Oudinot,” 84-86. For more on this, see IGOT/GEG, “Troços terminais das ribeiras do funchal: Obras marítimas e portuárias, Obras hidráulicas e barragens, Pontes,” (April 2011), ➝. For images of the partial execution of the project by norvia 2011–2014, see ➝.
For the different conceptions of disaster see: Ronald W. Perry & E. L. Quarantelli eds., What is a disaster? New Answers to Old Questions (International Research Committee on Disaster, 2005); Greg Bankoff, “Time is the Essence: Disasters, Vulnerability and History,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 22, no 3 (2004): 23-42. For the importance of sociocultural vulnerabilities inherent in disaster risk in Madeira see: V. Nuno Martins, “A Ecologia Política dos Desastres na Ilha da Madeira: Vulnerabilidade, Adaptação e Risco, no Século XIX,” Arquivo Histórico da Madeira, Nova Série 1 (2019): 231-262; and Sara Bonati, I Paesaggi Vulnerabili tra Percezione e Resilienza: l’Isola di Madeira e le Cinque Terre come Casi di Studio, doctoral thesis (Università degli Studi di Padova, 2014).
For the importance of knowledge of the past (memory and history) in studies and the management of disaster risk see: David Alexander, Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters (Hertfordshire: Terra Publishing, 2000), 105-128.
Reynaldo Oudinot, “Plano para o Reparo da Ilha da Madeira,” in Matos et al., eds., Um Olhar sobre as Obras e Providências de Reinaldo Oudinot, 31-44.
Isabella de França, Journal of a Visit to Madeira and Portugal (1853-1854) (Funchal: Junta Geral Do Distrito Autonomo Do Funchal, 1970), 55.
Maria dos Remédios Castelo Branco, “Testemunhos de Viajantes Ingleses sobre a Madeira,” in Actas do I Colóquio Internacional de História da Madeira (Funchal: SRTCE/DRAC, 1989), 198-246.
The Levadas are an ingenious network of aqueducts dug out of the Madeiran uplands, complemented by tunnels, underground chambers, and wells, which, since the beginning of the fifteenth century, have ensured the collection and controlled transport of water to the lower slopes, where the climate and relief are more conducive to human habitation. Today, they stretch about 1400 kilometers.
In 1939, Funchal City Council ordered the planting of bougainvillea to beautify the city’s streams. In time, these plants grew to cover a considerable area of the now largely obscured stream beds, which, in turn, became an ex-libris of tourist Funchal, and were adopted by the local populace as the identifying brand of the city. The upkeep of the bougainvillea was one of the issues raised during the civic mobilisation against concreting over the stream beds after the 2010 mudslides, when their heritage value was vaunted, despite their being a very recent innovation and that they actually aggravated some of risks.
Rui Campos Matos, “Funchal Urban Planning in the 20th Century: Tradition versus Modernity,” Translocal: Culturas Contemporâneas Locais e Urbanas 2 (2019): 82–92.
Ventura Terra, “Memória Descritiva e Justificativa,” Plano Geral de Melhoramentos do Funchal (1915), 1.
Terra, “Memória Descritiva e Justificativa”,” 3. Translator’s translation.
Irene Lucília Andrade, Protesto e Canto de Atena (Leiria: Editorial Diferença, 2001), 18-23. Translator’s translation.
Translated by Russell Shackleford.