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Chris Wilson
I have been taking photographs for more than 50 years, but I have only been doing so on a serious basis since 2017; I still have a lot to learn. Most of the images I have made fall somewhere in the overlap of travel and landscape photography. However, I suspect that many aficionados in either genre would regard me with some scepticism. I never use a tripod, which is anathema to plenty of landscape photographers, and I never photograph people, which a true travel photographer would surely find suspicious.
One aspect of the landscape that has always fascinated me is the transience of human impacts. The face of the land is always changing, and with it the structures created by people. As more and more Europeans have moved to live in cities over the last 200 years, villages that once flourished have lost their populations and decayed. There is often an overwhelming sense of poignancy in such places – for centuries people struggled to wrest a living from the land, but the results of their efforts are crumbling into nothing.
The village of Drave, hidden in a cleft in the mountains of Northern Portugal never had running tap water or mains electricity and was never accessible by road. It is four kilometres by a rough track to the nearest road – in the next village. Its inhabitants gradually drifted away after World War II to less remote spots, with the last permanent resident leaving around the turn of the century. Today the only buildings that are reasonably well maintained are a small chapel and a few houses used by the Scouts as a base for their outdoor activities. Most of the houses are in varying states of decay, from the almost-habitable to the utterly ruined. They were all made using local stone – schist – that breaks naturally into blocks with flat surfaces; doorways and other larger gaps were reinforced with large blocks of granite. There were few windows and the roofs were covered in loose slates. Streets and paths were simply carved from the bare underlying rock. Looking at the remains of the village today it feels more like an archaeological site – perhaps a Neolithic settlement – than a part of the modern world. It seems unimaginable that people in Western Europe lived in such primitive structures so recently.
Although the village is publicised in tourist literature as part of the Arouca UNESCO Geopark, an innovative and well thought-out way to enable visitors to appreciate the diverse geology, landscapes and history of the area, no one is responsible for curating Drave as a whole, and its buildings are rapidly falling into ruins. Most of the roofs have collapsed, even the precious wooden maize store has been vandalised. None of these images is a great photograph, but together they give a flavour of Drave at one point along its path towards oblivion.
