Encosta do Conventinho: between the town and the floodplain

South of Loures, Encosta do Conventinho proposes an urban park that extends Parque Adão Barata and reconnects the town with the floodplain.

South of Loures, a hillside facing the floodplain marks out the Encosta do Conventinho execution unit. The place is wedged between physical barriers in the territory: the EN8 and A8 roads to the east, the Mealhada stream to the north, and peripheral housing developments built in different decades. The hillside in the middle was a place people passed by rather than through, and the scheme gives it a new purpose: an urban park that extends Parque Adão Barata, better known as Parque da Cidade de Loures.

Park, housing and offices

More than 70% of the available land is given over to green space, whose topography shapes the outdoor places where people stop.

Infrastructure, natural and built

The area retains traditional structures for collecting, channelling and storing water: water galleries, channels and tanks, among them those of Quinta do Peixeiro, an eighteenth-century building now in ruins and listed in the municipal master plan as an element of heritage and archaeological value. The scheme restores these structures and extends them into reflecting pools and channels that run through the park, recalling the floodplain’s former use for flood irrigation.

The Portuguese Environment Agency’s Flood Risk Management Plan placed Loures and Odivelas among the twenty-two critical flood zones identified for mainland Portugal, and the Mealhada stream floods quickly. Mitigation entered the design from the outset, through retention basins upstream, weirs that attenuate flow, renaturalisation of the banks and riparian gallery, and raising the entire built ensemble clear of the flood zone.

“The creation of the said Park will establish the link between the remaining existing and proposed urban parks, as well as between the Green areas defined by the PDM, forming a Green Belt and a continuum naturale around the town.”

— Working translation of the Preliminary Programme for Encosta do Conventinho Park, Loures Municipal Council, April 2020

Several uses, one proposal

The proposal is organised into two distinct zones: to the east, a metropolitan-scale business park — Loures Office Park — served by the future light rail station; to the west and south, a new residential area, with housing set in a park context and cost-controlled dwellings.

The EN8 is re-profiled as a qualified entrance to the town, with a cycle route integrated into the Loures–Odivelas intermunicipal link. The pedestrian network gains walkways over the weirs and a crossing over the watercourse to Parque Adão Barata.

The work brought together urban design, landscape architecture, hydraulics, mobility and heritage, coordinated through a BIM model that allowed the proposal’s phasing to be tested before it was fixed, in close collaboration with the services of Loures Municipal Council.