Maria Helena Dias · 1984
This article critically assesses the initial development of Portugal’s Atlas of the Environment, launched in 1975 as a response to the absence of an up-to-date national atlas. Based on the 36 published sheets and the plan for a total of 92, the analysis examines the atlas’s organization, presentation, cartographic methods, accessibility, and intended readership. Its loose-sheet format offers important advantages: maps can be released and replaced individually, users may purchase only relevant materials, and dispersed geographical information can be brought together. Nevertheless, the work lacks a clear integrative framework and sufficient explanatory texts. Many sheets reproduce previously available maps without adapting or generalizing their information adequately for the common scale of 1:1,000,000. Excessive thematic categories, inconsistent titles and legends, poorly differentiated colours, very small mapped areas, and uncertain interpolation procedures frequently reduce readability and hinder evaluation of data reliability. The soil, land-use capability, climate, and vegetation maps illustrate these problems. The Administrative Map is identified as the atlas’s most significant achievement because its representation of parish boundaries fills an important gap in Portuguese base cartography. The article concludes that the project attempts to serve both specialists requiring spatial data and a broader non-specialist public, but does not consistently reconcile their different needs. Despite methodological and editorial shortcomings, the Atlas of the Environment remains a valuable attempt to compile national cartographic information and could become an important working instrument, particularly for geographers, if its sheets are more effectively standardized, simplified, contextualized, and coordinated.
