O Passado é uma cidade ideal: um olhar sobre a patrimonização de Évora

Abstract

This article is a reflection about the classification of Évora an a heritage city. This classification is still too much based in the quantity and quality of the city historic monuments, considering ancient current architecture and urban structures only as context of those monuments. The idealized perspective of Évora’s past that dominates the majority of the discourses about the city, symbolised by its most important historic buildings, explains why ancient current architecture and urban structures don’t have yet a heritage status similar to the monuments. More permeable to the history dynamics, thecurrent architecture and urban structures forms reflect the epochs of expansion as well as the epochs of depression. So, what we propose is another way of seeing the Évora’s value as heritage, a more enlarged one, which includes the entire city’s elements typological, stylistic and structural variability. Because all this variability is a manifestation of the complexity of Évora’s past.