In Porto's main suburban
station, Sao Bento, the concourse is
covered in tiles depicting historical
scenes including this one showing a
water wheel – possibly a tide mill
perhaps?
David Plunkett, in turn,
wrote to Claudia Silveira in Portugal
for possible clarification and
identification, and then responded to
Nigel:
The awaited reply from
Portugal over your enquiry of Oporto
mill on wall tiles has arrived : Make
a special note of the Alcantara
Tidemill within the (attached)
tile panel. I have looked at my
copy of 'Molinos de Mar y Estuarios'
by Litoral Atlantico, 2nd edition 2005.
The chapter on Portugal (from p.179) as
'Portugal Los molinos de marea', has
lots of data, pictures and diagrams.
Unfortunately Oporto Region, is a dead
area for recording at this time.
Hopefully Claudia will get round to the
research soon, as stated in her message
to me:
I would be very
interested in seeing these tiles,
however I only know 2 tide mills sites
in Portugal where a vertical water wheel
is documented, both of them in the south
and being a former adaptation. About a
possible existence of tidemills in Porto
area, I don’t have for the moment an
answer, because I don’t know very well
the medieval documentation for the
north, but I’ve been studying mostly the
south. However I have some
interrogations because I know that in
Oporto there were also inlets referred
to in some documents and some mills are
also mentioned. To be sure I would need
to make some research either in
documents either in geographical data
for the evolution of this area, which is
a project for the next years.
The only representation
of a tide mill in tiles is this one I
send you, which is the Tide Mill of
Alcântara, very close to Lisbon in the
northern bank of the Tagus, destroyed in
the XVIII th century. Next week there
will be a meeting here in Lisbon to
present the former conclusions of a
study that is being carried on this set
of tiles that represent the city of
Lisbon. I hope to participate to learn a
little bit more about the context of
production of these tiles.
(These edited email
extracts appear by kind permission of
Nigel Smith and David Plunkett.)
On 17th
November Nigel forwarded this reply from
Claudia which he had just received,
clarifying the tide mill matter further:
It’s a very beautiful
picture, but unfortunately, it seems to
be a river mill. In the Douro River
there were once several watermills with
a vertical wheel, some of them destroyed
to improve the navigation conditions
during the XIXth century. Some of the
remaining are very similar to this. My
doubts about tide mills in this area are
mostly those very near of Oporto,
because there was an inlet there, and
also nearby in Leça da Palmeira, where
some mills were also functioning very
close to the sea, but today they don’t
exist and old photos are not clear about
the typology because they show only the
front of the mill, where we can see some
horizontal waterwheels, but don’t show
us the mill pond. Maybe old documents
can tell us a little bit more... Best
regards, Cláudia Silveira
Can
any of our readers throw more light on
these Portuguese mills?
