Portugal - Atlas do Ambiente IV.1 - Carta Administrativa

Summary

From a geographical perspective, the civil parish constitutes the most significant unit at the local, regional, and even national levels. Its definition involved methods of varying degrees of accuracy which, taken together, made it possible to identify the country’s smallest functional subdivisions, integrated into the hierarchically superior units of local government—the municipalities. Portugal’s current administrative organization, established from 1835 onward, comprises, in descending order, districts, municipalities, and civil parishes (then called parishes), all of which are local government entities. In the 1940s, the University of Coimbra sought to produce a map at the civil-parish level, drawing not only on cartography covering the entire national territory (the Chorographic Map, at a scale of 1:100,000), but also on intensive desk research involving bibliography and statistics, as well as informed deductive reasoning. For the purposes of the cadastral survey, the Geographical and Cadastral Institute used the precision of the tachymeter to survey approximately half of the territory, while simultaneously demarcating the respective civil parishes. Later, using an expedited method based on local surveys, the National Environment Commission sought to represent, at level 5